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Participant
March 19, 2024
Question

Disable OCR in Edit for pre-OCRed documents

  • March 19, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 2144 views

I have a large document set - all items are scanned sheets that are already competently OCRed by scanner software. I wish to do 3 things:

 

  1. Concatenate files into "chapters"
  2. Add a header and page numbers
  3. Aggressively compress the background image to reduce file size

 

Whenever I go into Edit mode (to add headers), Acrobat insists on redoing the OCR. And it is doing a poor job (and wasting my time), compared to the original scanner software.

 

How can I DISABLE this REDUNDANT and INFERIOR OCR compulsion that Acrobat seems to have? I have already disabled all the "make scannable" options wherever I have found them.

 

Help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope...

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1 reply

Amal.
Community Manager
Community Manager
March 19, 2024

Hi @William361515968epv 

 

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

 

The OCR process is turned on by default. When you open a scanned document for editing, the current page is converted to editable text. As you scroll, the page in focus becomes editable. You can disable the automatic OCR option if you don't want to convert your scanned documents to editable text.

Choose Edit > Text.

To turn off automatic OCR, click on the gear icon at the top and uncheck Recognize scanned text option. Acrobat won't automatically run OCR the next time you open the document for editing.

 

 

 

Regards

Amal

Participant
April 6, 2024

Hi, Amal.  As many users have reported in another thread, this option is not actually available.  (Currently using 2024.001.20643 on Mac.)  The "Recognize scanned text" option is checked, but it is grayed out and is not available to change.

 

Furthermore, users--including myself--are trying to figure out how to disable this option as the default.  Unchecking the box (even if it worked) is tedious if this feature is never used.

 

Any suggestions?  Thanks!

 

 

Participant
December 19, 2024

Hello, 

I don't know if this will help you, but I finally got ti to allow me to uncheck that box by removing show bounding boxes, Closing the pop up, Click on the convert at the top, Click on San & OCR, the next time I went back to the Edit Text>Cog> I was available to remove the checkbox.  I hope it works for you. 

 

I don't know if you saw this or not but to stop it from automatically running, if you close everything and go to the Menu dropdown and select Create>PDF from scanner You will see 

Click on the cog. Uncheck the Recognize Tex (OCR)

Hope this helps and you don't have to do a reg hack to fix as suggested in the other thread. 

Good Luck!

Patty