Adobe Acrobat Pro - How to find out what has happened to a file to make it unresponsive to OCR

Report · Jul 17, 2023

Hi,

This is my first time posting to this forum, so apologies if I havent followed foru etiquette etc.

I had created a file that included emails and documents that were all searchable. When I combined these files in Pro the single document was also completely earchable.

I then passed the file to someone else. When it came back I could not do a search for text, meaning I had to manually search each page.

I ran the two different files through th compare tools. I only did a few pages but it came back as if lots of graphics have been added. Rectangular boxes piled up in the unsearchable file.

It looked as though the font recognized was T168 for example. When I copied and pasted a few words in the the find tool, it looked like small square boxes.

I am pretty sure that my file has been sabotaged, either intentionally but of course it could have been an accident. Whatever, something has been done to it and I would like to know what.

I have managed to get it into a searchable format by exporting all of the pages as individual .tiff files.

Has anyone got any ideas of what has been done to the file in the first place?

Thank you for your time reading this message. Hoefully I have explained it well enough to get your feedback and find out what has gone wrong/been done to my file to make it unsearchable.

Report · Jul 17, 2023

Hello again, I have compared one page in the document. The original recongises the font as calibri in that document. But in the one that has came back from a collaborator, the text type at first is T1. But then when I select all the text, the font type box is empty. I am assuming that it is recognising multiple types of font.

Report · Jul 17, 2023

It seems that the file you received is comprised of images.

Report · Jul 18, 2023

Thank you for your reply and I agree Maria. However, the whole document has been scanned and all parts apart from the appendix has allowed the OCR tool to recognize text. So it appears therr is something with the last 400 pages. I would appreciate anyone's suggestions what could have been done to render the OCR Tool ineffective with the last 400 pages. Many thanks Kay