Gibberish after editing Acrobat Pro

[#1]

 

Document needs editing. Click Edit PDF. This is what I always get.

help please......

Lori

[gary_sc · Accepted solution]

OK, this can be a bit confusing, but let me take a stab at explaining this:

You have a Food Lion receipt that you took a photo of. Because it's a simple receipt on thin paper, you have the stuff on the backsides, and the paper is not set to white. All of this makes a poor copy image for processing via OCR (Optical Character Recognition). 

When you click on a PDF document that is just an image, Acrobat has to convert it to a searchable document via OCR. The poorer the quality of the original document, the poorer the quality of the OCR. For example, if you have "r" and "i" adjacent to each other, it can easily be confused to look like an "n" for the result. That's wrong, but that's what it sees. In addition, if you do not have the original font in your system, Acrobat will switch that font to something else. Ergo, the Food Lion font is completely different.

If you want to do a deep dive in how to scan (not take a photo of a document, but a real scan) to get a better quality result, you can read a blog I wrote for Adobe several years ago. 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/scanning-clean-searchable-pdfs/m-p/4785...

Meanwhile, what kind of editing did you need to do on a receipt? What were you hoping to achieve? Maybe there's another way to accomplish the same thing.

[#3]

Hi Gary SC,

Thank you for your awesome reply. I am going to try and read through your deep dive editorial, yet as a newbie, I get intimated with words I don't understand.  Like not knowing how to make the scanner recognize a WHITE page....

So let me read and hope I can fix it. As for the reason for altering the receipt is that I needed to upload it for reward points but they only want the pet items I bought before taxes, so I have to delete or erase all the items that do not qualify so the receipt shows the prices I pade before any taxes were added.   Kind silly but they make users do the work. OK...diving into your article...

Thank you Gary from SC.

Lori from VA