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tomkreutz
New Participant
December 23, 2016
Question

Goading Acrobat Pro DC (Mac) into OCR in Edit mode

  • December 23, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1252 views

  Acrobat Pro DC for Mac 2015 Release (15.006.30244) frequently has trouble initiating OCR when I initiate Edit PDF.  Nothing happens, and the scanned image is not processed.  The text in the image is quite clear. 

   I've discovered that, if I select the image, flip it upside down and then back again, and click Add Text and then Edit...Acrobat will suddenly start processing the image and (accurately) performing ORC on it.

   This appears to be an obvious bug.

   I can supply a test file that displays this behavior reproducibly.  I'm running El Capitan (OS X 10.11.6) on a mid-2015 Retina MacBook Pro.

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1 reply

Karl Heinz Kremer
Karl Heinz Kremer
Community Expert
December 23, 2016

Please report the bug here: Feature Request/Bug Report Form

The Acrobat Forums are mainly used by users of Adobe's applications, so it's not the best way to make Adobe aware of bugs. I would upload the test file to the Document Cloud, and then share the link to the file in the bug report. Here are some instructions about sharing a file via DC: Share Documents via Adobe's Document Cloud - KHKonsulting LLC

T
tomkreutzAuthor
New Participant
December 23, 2016

Dear Karl,

  Thanks for your helpful suggestions.  I submitted a forum post because the Adobe web site said that this was my only support option.  Also, I expect that other users might benefit from my little workaround.
   The file link is: Shared Files - Acrobat.com

Tom

Karl Heinz Kremer
Karl Heinz Kremer
Community Expert
December 29, 2016

Tom,

this file contains "renderable text". You can see that when you try to start OCR via the Tools>Enhance Scans>Recognize Text function. You will end up with this error message:

"Renderable text" means normal text, text that is not part of an image. Acrobat for whatever reason does not want to OCR a page that already contains "normal" text. You can see this "text" when you bring up the "Contents" pane on the left side:

In your case, when you expand this text element, you will see that it's actually empty. This means that you can easily remove this text element without changing the document. You do this by highlighting the "Text" element, and then using the delete key, or by right-clicking and selecting to delete from the menu. Once you do that, the OCR function should be executed without a problem when you try to edit the document (at least it was here, several times in a row).

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