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Tom Rioux in Austin
Participant
November 12, 2023
Question

export PDF to Word does not OCR using Adobe Acrobat Pro 2017 (17.012.30262)

  • November 12, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 530 views

I scanned 2 pages of typed text at 600 dpi gray scale to jpg files, combined the jpg files into a pdf, opened the PDF then Tools -> Export PDF -> Microsoft Word -> Word Document then click Export, chose folder then entered file name file.docx (I have Microsoft Office 365 up to date), then click Save; opened the word document and it only has the images not the OCR text

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    1 reply

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 12, 2023

    Hi @Tom Rioux in Austin, this is because you never OCRed your text. You had your JPG image, opened that into Acrobat, and made a PDF of the JPG image.

     

    Because JPG is a lossy format, Acrobat does not automatically process the image into OCR while converting the document into a PDF. And you then have to do a 2nd step of telling Acrobat to "Recognize Text" in the currently open document.

     

    However, If you scan and save the documents as TIF documents (a non-lossy format) when you drag those documents onto the Acrobat icon, it will both convert and process OCR concurrently. So, you work with either approach, but the issue you encountered is that you have a PDF of an image file, not an OCRed document. 

     

    For future scanning issues, I suggest you check out this blog I wrote for Adobe a number of years ago.

     

    https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/scanning-clean-searchable-pdfs/m-p/4785435?page=1#M89

     

    Good luck!

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