How do I stop acrobat auto-straigtening pages?

[Damien665]

I'm digitising a series of old magazines where a portion of the text is sometimes printed on an angle. When I click 'Edit' in Adobe Acrobat, before it will let me do anything like crop the pages, it automatically rotates the pages to what it believes is straight, though this ends up putting the pages on bizarre angles. I want the page to disaply a normal portrait rotation no matter what angle the text on the page was printed on. How do I turn this automatic straghtening feature off?

[JR Boulay]

Since these pages are scanned images you should not "Edit in Acrobat".

Using the Acrobat "Edit" tool you should make a right-clic on the page/image and choose "Edit using : Adobe Photoshop".

Once the change has been made in Photoshop: Save and Close to transfer the change to the PDF file.

[Document Geek]

Are you by chance running OCR on those pages? I have found that when running OCR, Acrobat always adjusts page orientation if scanned images. I can see how this unusual page layout, with text askew, would cause issues.

However, I also digitize old magazines, and I wasn't able to replicate the issue of Acrobat automatically rotating pages, unless I was running OCR. Are you by change running OCR before trying to crop the pages?

For what it's worth, I do not know of a way to turn off that auto-rotation feature in Acrobat.

Maybe you could try scanning it with larger margins so that when Acrobat does automatically rotate it, you can go into Photoshop and rotate it back to the correct angle. If you do so, keep in mind that Acrobat will automatically stretch the image to fill the box previously filled by the previous image. So the proportions might be a little wonky and require some fiddling.

[Damien665]

Thanks for your comment. Yes, I am also doing OCR on the pages, which indeed also rotates them, though the pages seem to rotate as soon as I hit 'edit' before even doing OCR. The end goal was cropping the pages and then doing OCR, though OCR was the most important, so if there's no way for me to stop the auto-rotation during OCR I guess that's all I need to know.

Thanks for the work-around; I'll give it a go. And at least I know it's not just me who can't find a way to stop this. 🙂

[JR Boulay · Accepted solution]

Document Geek Damien665
"I do not know of a way to turn off that auto-rotation feature in Acrobat."

You can but in a different process:

1- scan your documents leaving images untouched (no OCR, no optimisation) and save as PDF,

2- run the "Enhance : Scanned document" tool to OCRize and optimize, there are more settings than in the "Recognize text" tool. See below:

[JR Boulay]

Have you tried to "crop with generative fill"  in the latest version of Photoshop?
It does it in a jiffy. 😉

[Damien665]

Oh I didn't know that existed, thanks for sharing.