Participant

Answered

How do I straighten scanned pages in Adobe Acrobat DC?

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
September 29, 2017
12 replies
362719 views

How can I straighten scanned PDF pages in Adobe Acrobat DC?

Correct answer marie_4276

The pages I just edited are skewed a little - I couldn't scan them myself because the place where I scan is closed for Covid, so a friend did it for me, and I didn't want to be too fussy. I rotated them 90 degrees, cropped them, removed the specks, put the single pages into one 42-page file, and posted it on the website. Some day, when this pandemic is over, I will scan it myself and be very, very careful to get it perfectly straight, and do the rest over again. If I had seen this page before it was all done, yes I would have tried deskewing it too, but when I have done that in photo programs - even very good ones - the type has always lost some quality, and it is probably more important to have it sharp and clear than completely straight.

Eureka! That was the solution!

AAPro DC contains the "Scan & OCR" tool in the TOOLS bar. It is green and looks like a printer. I had to play with it a little to get the results I needed; here is what worked to deskew my badly skewed document:

- Tools/Scan & OCR

- Enhance

- Scanned document

Voila! Thank you so much!

J

Jeffery26672072y9tt

Participant

I have to frequently straighten (deskew) a lot of music (all have been purchased by me and is my personal copy - but much of it has to be scanned for my pdf reader.

There is no "enhance" feature in my Adobe Acrobat. I simply load the scan into Adobe Acrobat. Using the edit feature I rotate the page to be viewed correctly. Then I crop the page (most Organ music is always in the landscape orientation and not standard American Sized paper and my scanner will be able to scan a document that is 24" x 24" so there is always some cropping needed). After cropping the image(s) in the document I proceed to the first page and then choose the "select text" on-screen button but I do not actually click on anything in the document. The program will then "read" the page again and then it automatically will straighten the page out.

Back in the old days (ok, maybe 10 years or so ago) Adobe Acrobat had an actual feature called "DeSkew" under the "enhance" category and I think that has gone the way of the horse and buggy. It should do this automatically if you give the program time to do it. It is not instantanious, it does take a few seconds to work. I do not know why these "people" on here feel that they can gaslight everyone into hating the product when they do not know the answer. Don't respond if you cannot be civil to each other - and don't ask "why they would want to do such a preposerous thing as deskew" grow up already anyway.

S

Shirley5C7F

Participating Frequently

Which version do you have? This process sounds ideal for the newer versions
that are actually less functional than the older ones. (I read years ago in
this forum that DC is less functional than it's predecessors.) Acrobat 7
seems to be ideal, but you need to keep an older computer that will run it
in legacy mode, then use Bluetooth to transfer the document to your newer
computer.

J

Jeffery26672072y9tt

Participant

Hello Shirley5C7F,

I am using Adobe Acrobat Pro 64-bit version: 2024.005.20320.

I have to have a full version of Acrobat because of my music needs (basically zero music is now printed by a publisher). They want to sell you the outragiously priced Digital version for the same price as printing and it is now printed pretty-much "on-demand" so it takes about a month to get anything via mail. They win because there no longer is a need to keep "inventory" that may or may not sell.

I had Acrobat DC for a while so I know that internal software things are not in the same spot, but regardless make sure you have "Preferences" set correctly in the settings. Make sure you have recognize [Text] and [Smooth line art]. Then you will have to open the file and click on "Edit" it should automatically recognize the first page text or line art. If you have to rotate and/or crop do this before you recognize the text/line art. You may have to recognize each page (it only takes a couple of seconds for each page). This feature may be under "OCR recognition". I know that the layout of each Adobe version is different. I do know that when my computer opens a PDF document in the browser window (I use BRAVE browser) the document opens as a tab, but even though I have the full version of Adobe Acrobat I cannot edit the document. I must first close the open tab with the PDF, and then open the document that is now downloaded to my computer in my full version of Acrobat to work correctly. I think that the Adobe [Light] browser version is just for sign and send purposes. This is for Windows PC's only - I do not know what the Apple Actobat looks like or functions like. I hope that this helps.

P

PL_Andre0822

Participant

2024 -- The suggested fix does not work on current version of Adobe Pro. What am I paying for - ?

D

davidj62580202

Participant

NONE of these deskew hints work with large blueprint scans where text recognition is undesirable (Acrobat Pro 2024). We just want to rotate the entire image in (far) less than 90 degree increments!

MyerPj

Community Expert

Can you put the image into Photoshop and straighten it there?

D

davidj62580202

Participant

Yes, but it's a slow (many extra steps) workaround and only available to those with a full CS license. The resulting PDF is 3x the size of the original, though with more steps, saving as "reduced" size PDF brings it down.

W

Will-M3

Participant

As we slowly wean our company away from Adobe due to the removal of useful features (like deskewing), and the addition of debilitating features (constant blue "help" bubbles that can't be turned off), we find ourselves using Bluebeam Revu more and more often. It's much more powerful for our needs as a general contractor and for general business document manipulation.

In Bluebeam Revu, deskewing is a two-step process that works perfectly:
1. Using your keyboard, Press Ctrl+Alt+D. Your cursor will change to crossbars.
2. Click and drag a line that should be horizontal in the PDF.

AdUser0924

Participating Frequently

Moved to Tracker Software PDF-XChange. The very best IMHO.

N

nwjh1957

Participant

To update the answer and note the Mac version of Acrobat Pro (2022.003).

Open the Scan and OCR tool.

In the tool menu bar, click on Enhance.

Select Scanned Document from the drop down menu.

Click on the Enhance button and the tool will go through your document and straighten all the text.

Done!

I'm not sure how it will go on pages with very little text, as that appears to have been an issue in the past.

umijin

Participating Frequently

The problem with the "Enhance" option for me is that it doesn't enhance the text image, but makes it remarkably worse, even choosing the highest quality jpeg.

Recognize Text will deskew if you choose the option to make it Editable Text and Imagess in the settings for Recognize text. You can also deskew a page at a time if you click on the Edit PDF tool. It will then apply deskewing to every page you scroll to.

E

erlksdfhqp

Participating Frequently

How is this remotely acceptible?

This disaster piece of malware is on version 20(?) and is generations behind the simplest free iPhone apps.

AAADDDOOOOOBBBBEEEE!

P

PAFC

Participant

FYI, I finally fixed my skewed scan by following the instructions for straightening an image (and I'm using free trial rn of Adobe DC). After edit, it automatically selected the text as one object and the image as another. Upon right clicking it fixed the skewing. The second one I opened and edited, it fixed them without me doing anything.

Align images or objects

Open the PDF in Acrobat, and then choose Tools > Edit PDF > Edit .
Select the object (or objects) - press and hold the Shift key and then click the objects one-by-one.
Under Objects in the right hand panel, click Align Objects and choose the appropriate alignment option.

N

NDAPhoto

Participant

Karl's answer is correct, but incomplete. After choosing the Enhance settings, select the Recognize Text menu and click the blue "Recognize Text" button. This executes the optical character recognition. Each page in the document will be converted to OCR and then rotated to deskew the page. (I am using Acrobat Pro DC on 4/14/19).

C

CCollada

Participant

Document I received was very skewed and as "micha-elv8353385" in this thread & this tutorial: Straighten and Deskew PDF Pages in Acrobat XI (adobe.com) had mentioned, this method did not work for me as well.

But "Recognize Text" deskewed it for me under Tools -> Text Recognition -> In This File:

Hope it helps someone.

S

ScottyMcBerlin

Participant

Exactly. With little text and no clear lines the program apparently has little to work with and the results will reflect as much. Turning on "Recognize Text" generally works to solve any problems.

J

joelb73177390

Participant

That page has about 10 parallel lines; I'm amazed the Enhanced Scan de-skew feature is so stupid that it needs more help than that.

Thank goodness "Recognize Text" is smarter.

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