I need to OCR scan a lot of receipts and some are pretty faded

Hi Kurt,

Keep in mind that Acrobat itself has no scanning capabiity by itself whatsoever. It relies upon the scanner's software to do all the work. And if you're having issues, you will have to do some work yourself. That is, if you're not getting what you want by push-button scanning, than you will have to go in and change some settings. Depending on the ability of the scanner's software, you might be able to save these settings for "receipts" (or whatever you want to call them).

Here is a blog I wrote for Adobe some time back and this will go significantly further than you need but should be able to proivde a direction as to what's needed to get the entire receipt scanned. 

One thing that should help you is that you do not indicate whether you are using a flat-bed scanner or a feed scanner (such as is used for self-feeding a bunch of pages into a scanner). But if you are using a flat bed scanner, you might consider putting a slight gray paper over the receipt so the scanner can see the edges of the receipt. Since most scanners I've seen have a very white back, this might be causing some confusion for the auto-sensing part of the scanner's software. Might as well make it easier!

Here's the blog:

http://photosbycoyne.com/Gary's_Help/Scanning/clean-scanning.html

Good luck!