Acrobat doesn't ocr text - leaves them as images

[Tim86]

May I have some help please?

I use OCR to allow me to highlight and mark up text of scanned or prepared PDFs. Mostly these are unencrypted academic documents. I find that Acrobat Pro DC often does not OCR text when I click Edit. Instead it leaves the scanned blocks as images denoted in the upper left hand corner by the landscape icon and pop up text that says "This is an image". Is DC capable of OCRing these images? If so, how do I force the application to OCR?

Thanks very much

[aminahb68172700]

Hello - I am having the an issue now with the latest update to Acrobat 2019. I used to be able to run a text recognition on encrypted/secured files, be it the pdf or a scanned jpg. With the software update I can no longer do that unfortunately, there's no option to recognize text but only "edit file" which is clearly not possible for secured files. This is very annoying as I need to do this a lot in my job. Grateful if you could please advise.

[Nancy25168225c3fq]

Its 2022 and Adobe Pro DC has failed to fix this problem. I have 168 PDF pages of a state law and despite optimizing the doc, running text recognition, and adjusting every option I can find in these threads, it won't locate words I clearly see in the doc. And if I try to highlight a word it just does a big oval on the page. Lots of money for DC Pro for not much return. So frustrating. 

[Anna25179403cbaa]

This may not be plausible for a 168 page document but, I took picture in the adobe app on my phone, converted it to word on my iphone. I opened it up in the microsoft office app not word it's self, the app was able to recognize 90% of the text. I have to make some corrections but it still gave me a little of what i needed. then i was able to convert back into a PDF that was able to be searched and edited.

[Robert38026074ualg]

Hi.  Despite having Adobe Acrobat Pro (version 22.003.20263.0), there are documents I download / print to a PDF that the text appears to come in as an image and when I run 'Recognize Text' or 'Enhance' nothing changes, nor does the word search function work (obviously no ability to highlight either).  I’ll first provide the method that worked for me to get  OCR text functionality and the ability to highlight followed other methods that had limited or did not work.

1. *** Print as “Save as PDF” worked to get both OCR & ability to highlight / edit text ***
2. Using the ‘save’ button to save as type “Adobe Acrobat Document.pdf (*.pdf) had OCR text functionality but security features so no ability to highlight or edit text.
3. Using the ‘print’ button to print as Adobe PDF results in no OCR text ability even after running 'Recognize Text' or 'Enhance' in the Scan & OCR tool (the text appears to be blocky images).
4. Using the ‘print’ button to print as “Microsoft Print to PDF” saves the document as a pdf, but wouldn’t open (error opening document message). I tried this method multiple times and it never worked / opened.

I hope this helps someone else as well as the folks at Adobe to resolve it.

[Amal.]

Hi there 
 
Hope you are doing well and sorry to hear that
 
Is this an issue with a particular PDF file or with all the PDFs? Please try with a different PDF file and check. If the file is stored on a shared network/drive please download it to your computer locally and then try again.
 
Please update the application to the recent version 24.02.20857. Go to Help > Check for updates and reboot the computer once.
 
Also try to repair the installation from the help menu (Win Only) and see if that works.
 
You may also try to reset the Acrobat preferences as described here (https://adobe.ly/3RQLtr3) and see if that works.

~Amal