Any way to clean up text in an OCR'd document?

[StringTheoryNYC]

It seems that OCR provides the ability to copy and search text, but ugly fonts remain ugly. What is the best way to have clear, standard characters swapped in in place of the ugly-looking text?

[Dave__M · Accepted solution]

The settings in the OCR feature controls how the output looks.  There are 3 output settings, and only you can tell which is best by running tests using them all. 

You could also run the OCR, and export as a Word document, clean it up, and remake a PDF that might look great.

I hope this is helpful.

My best,

Dave

[StringTheoryNYC]

Thanks, Dave! Looks likely that this will do it, so I'm marking it as "correct answer."

[StringTheoryNYC]

Dave,  The 'editable text' option looked promising, but when we tried it, it definitely did not replace the fonts.  The OCR itself worked, but font appearance is unchanged, and noticeably noisy or degraded.

Is there any way to get feedback to see why Acrobat failed to do this?  Perhaps it was unable to detect the font type?

[Dave__M]

The Editable Text and Images setting will not replace the scanned font with a different looking one.  Rather, it will create a font that resembles your original scan, but with smoother lines, making it easier on the eyes to read.  Take a look at the image below.  The text was created on a typewriter in the 1950s, and scanned.  I zoomed in to just these characters so you can see what Acrobat does to one's original scanned text.

If you want a typeface that looks completely different, I suggest that after you run the OCR, you export you PDF to MS Word (or another true authoring application), clean it up & change the typeface to what you want, and then export to PDF.  That would ensure you get precisely what you want.

I hope this helps.

My best,

Dave

[Nora275427603605]

This is a bit of a fail answer. MS Word already converts scanned PDF's to editable documents. Why would I use Acrobat to import a scanned document just to have it exported to MS Word when I can do that directly from Word, which quite frankly does a better job of interpreting the PDF and changing the fonts automatically and will make a completely new looking PDF. This seems a rather simple thing to have included in Acrobat but was for some reason left out. I mean I get you may want to maintain the integrity of a scanned PDF sometimes by matching the native fonts, but at least make it an option to clean up the document if you want. Just bought Acrobat Pro and already 2 glaring issues with it. The other was already brought up with Adobe.