How support Arabic OCR technology?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
November 11, 2020
2 replies
2013 views

We are heading to 2021, and Adobe still does not support Arabic OCR technology!
I expected this technology to be supported by a recent update.
I'm now unfortunately disappointed with Adobe.

Scan documents and OCR

This topic has been closed for replies.

try67

Community Expert

Arabic is an extremely difficult language to OCR due to the nature of its alphabet (especially the connected script and diacritics). My guess is Adobe is not seeing a big enough marketplace for it to justify such development. If enough people ask for it, that might change, of course.

Zaid Al Hilali

Community Expert

@try67, we Arabic language users thought the same back in the '80s that Arabic is too hard for developers to serve. However, many developers overcame most of these obstacles years ago in so many areas including OCR. We have a stand-alone OCR application for many years from Sakhr.com whom are based in Kuwait. There is this Russian company which I cannot recall their name had also developed an Arabic OCR for scanners, and another company based in Dubai developed an enterprise archive solution that includes OCR for Arabic newspapers, municipalities, councils, and general government usage.

The Arabic language is used by over 350 million people, in 20 odd countries, on top of this, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, Kurdish, and a few other languages share the same Arabic alphabets which adds to the total of 800 million people that need such service.

So it is fair to say Adobe with its army of developers and programmers is capable of developing OCR for the Arabic language - if and when they want to.

try67

Community Expert

It's certainly possible. Never claimed it wasn't, just that it's not simple. And I'm sure Adobe would have done it already if they thought it worth the investment. I guess they don't consider it to be...

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> I expected this technology to be supported by a recent update.

Which update? Was there an announcement?

Zaid Al Hilali

Community Expert

https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/18416344-arabic-ocr

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Test Screen Name

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Thank you for sharing that. I see it is much discussed. We have nothing to add to that discussion, it is Adobe's positition. We are just end users, so posting here doesn't move anything forwards. Or backwards.

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