OCR function does not put pages in the correct orientation

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
March 3, 2023
2 replies
2844 views

I have a paid for program that says it is Adobe Acrobat Standard 2020. I used to use Acrobat 9. I work with documents that have a mixture of page orientations: "text" is portrait orientation and tables are landscape orientation. While doing OCR Acrobat 9 would correctly orient all of the pages so that all pages were readable without my needing to manually rotate anything. I cannot find any way to make this program do the same thing. Is there a setting I am missing? It seems odd that the usability of this program has diminished so much over time. It is a very time consuming endeaver to go through and fix this.

Note: I am not the one making the original document. I am the end user. I am given documents that were made by other people in other organizations from mine and do not have the ability to ask them to redo their documents. I need to efficiently use these documents to write reports, including extracting the data out of tables to use in excel (among other things).

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gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Darla,

I'm sorry but there are a bunch of issues here. For one, Acrobat 9 is well beyond the "end of life." That is, it is so old that Adobe no longer supports it. Think of an old car where all the parts are no longer made.

Next, are you using the same computer OS that you were using when you first got Acrobat 9?

Lastly, if you are not making the original documents, who is, and how are they making them? Are they being scanned? Assembled? What format are they in? PDF? TIFF? JPG?

I'm not sure anyone can help you. At least not without more information.

D

Darla275300216j0pAuthor

Known Participant

Hi Gary. Thank you for replying!!! I am not using Acrobat 9. [I wish I was.] I am using Adobe Acrobat Standard 2020 on a Windows 11 PC. The documents come to me in pdf format. All different people make them, and I would guess they use different methods, depending on what is available in their workplace and what they know how to do. Some arrive as scans (i.e., the entire document was printed then scanned). Some come from microfiche. Others have a part of the document as a "text pdf" while other parts, such as tables, are printed, scanned, then inserted as images. For the one I am currently looking at, the document as a whole was originally in Word 2016, but some pages include images that are scanned tables or other documents.

What I do know for certain, is that I used to be able to do OCR on an entire scanned document, and the end result would have all of the OCR'd pages properly oriented, i.e., a mixture of portrait and landscape would result, so that all of the pages were able to be read by me without having to rotate them.

I think what you are going to tell me is that Adobe Acrobat no longer will do that. But I hope you will say something other than that. As I said, I find it shocking how the usability of this program has diminished so much over time. Acrobat 6 was better than 9, and now this....

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Darla, first off, my apologies. You did state that you were on Acrobat Standard, but my eye caught your comment about Acrobat 9 and fixated on that. Again, my apologies.

Otherwise, I have to say that the range of materials you are receiving is extraordinarily varied. I've never worked with a PDF generated from microfiche; I have no idea what the image's resolution is from them. In addition, taking documents, printing them, then scanning the printing and putting that into another document is a pre-planned nightmare.

Also, as a Mac user, I've never used Acrobat Standard; I've always used Acrobat Pro. So, unfortunately, I've no idea what OCR differences there are between the two. But I know that what you're describing would be a big challenge for Acrobat Pro.

Another obstacle you have is that because the documents you are receiving are undoubtedly of various resolutions, the quality of any OCR will be questionable. Let me give you a classic example: if you have the letter combination "ri," depending on the quality and resolution of the scan, plus if the original scan was saved as a highly compressed JPG, it's easy for those letters to be seen by the OCR as an "n." Thus, the word "right," will be seen as "nght." From this, if you were searching for the word right, it would not be found.

Also, scans of Excel charts are notoriously challenging for OCR.

Suffice it to say that I believe that what you have and your needs and expectations lead me to say that this is too great a challenge for Adobe Acrobat's OCR engine. I suggest contacting other OCR companies to see if they have a trial period and see how well their software does. You might find that Acrobat does about as good as anything else out there, but then you'll know for sure.

I wish you the best of luck; you have a big challenge with these documents.

D

Darla275300216j0pAuthor

Known Participant

Should this be in a different "topic"? Is there anyone who can help with this? If not, how do I get help with this?

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