Participant

Answered

How to ACTUALLY turn off Auto OCR - or I truly despise 'performing page recognition' / Automatic OCR

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
September 16, 2020
13 replies
65484 views

For myself (and it appears many others) this is the worst feature Adobe Acrobat (maybe Adobe period) currently has. Trying to edit a PDF is a nightmare with this idiotic scan. It repeatedly scans, over and over (once isn't enough?) it takes forever, and oddly it tilts random images off center.

What is the purpose of this? To frustrate users into using another PDF editor? I could understand if it was a work in progress, but you can't even turn the damn thing off. I've tried all the "steps" recommended and nothing. Yes, I have the latest version.

Threads like this appear through-out Adobe support. It's currently a garbage feature - allow me to turn it off until it's useful. Until then, I'm using another editor.

Correct answer rogerinlondon

To see this sidebar, I need to click on somethink like "Disable New Acrobat", but even when I see this sidebar, the "recognize text" box is greyed out and I can't doing anything with it. Is there any solution that works for either New Acrobat or Old Acrobat? Both versions I only get a greyed out option. I'm losing hours at work trying to fix this from ruining documents.

This worked for me, originally posted on Feb 17, 2024.

"go to preferences, select "reading", at the top of that page select "Do not read documents"

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winmark01

Participant

Dear all,

First, to Bernd Alheit: your response does not fit the issue, and you need to look again.

First, in my version of Acrobat Pro DC (Mac 2015.006.30527), there is no 'Recognise text' button to turn on or off in the Edit PDF side-bar menu, regardless of what you and the user guide claim. (see my two attached images)

Second, having text recognition and saving occur automatically is a very sub-standard feature – I am a happy advocate for Adobe products usually, but Adobe have screwed up on this one. It needs fixing.

Third, the situation that brings me to this forum is that I recently exprienced the following; I often check and pre-flight files for a publisher - files supplied by other designers – before they go off to the printers. In the last fews days a disappointed author has come back with complaint to the publisher that a small part of one image, which contained a scan of some [intentionally] hand-drawn lettering got printed as ugly gobble-de-guk. This seems to have occured through automatic 'text recognition' process forced on all pages when I made one intervention on another image on another page.

Now the question of liability raises its ugly head! No-one is happy.

Bernd Alheit – you may think you have correctly answered the issue, but you haven't really – please look again and show you expert credemtials by coming up with solutions that work!

I'm with the other complainats on this one. Simply not good enough from Adobe.

Cheers

Bruce

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

The option is available in Adobe Acrobat DC:

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winmark01

Participant

Hi Bernd Alheit, thanks for responding, but reiterating a ’solution’ that doesn’t work simply makes things worse, particularly as your advice is marked as a ‘correct answer’.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, and sent you screen grabs of, the 'Recognise text' button DOES NOT APPEAR at any time in my version of Acrobat Pro DC (which I am informed is up-to-date) in the 'Edit

PDF' panel. The rest looks the same, but the command you keep referring to is simply not there.

In the place where you show a tickable 'Recognise text' button, I simply have a curved arrow with a 'Revert to image' label – this is greyed out and only active when an image has been converted.

Please tell me, if you know, what is going on, and why the discrepancy?

[The version I have is 2015.006 30527] running on Mojave.]

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defaultaa9yxftizujs

Participating Frequently

MAN I am in an absolute rage right now over this feature and was about to post something like this myself.

i cannot actually believe how annoying this is. I have made my documents in indesign. My graphics and layout and colours are DONE. I dont need acrobate to touch that. All im trying to do is edit some text fields as i am making an interacive PDF.

Everytime i click slightly out of the text fields or something when im adjusting, it decides to scan my whole page and 'recognise' everything and make it all editable and movable. WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT THIS TO HAPPEN AUTOMATICALLY?

its ruining my design, my files are ruined and i have to start all opver again to try and do this text fields without clicking in the wrong place or it will happen again!! im on like my tenth time now. I have had enough!!!!! turn off this stupid feature

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defaultaa9yxftizujs

Participating Frequently

P.s. AND BY THE WAY this is not 'Recognise text' that is turned off. this is called 'page recognition' and i dont know if im just too much in a rage to see how to turn this off but i cannot see anything anywhere to disable it

BarbLovesInDesign

Inspiring

I have had the same problem, but just with the latest update, though - as of today. I had to go to the Acrobat preferences, and under "Convert from pdf", view EVERY format in the list, and check the edit options for ALL of them, to uncheck the "Run OCR if needed" wherever it appeared (changes it to 'false'). and so far it is working. Previously, it would want to OCR scanned images sometimes, but then I could turn off the check box as indicated above (which also removed any OCR results), and all would be fine until the next time I checked the box on because I did want to OCR something....

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

When you Edit PDF what want you edit?

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Clint__Author

Participant

In this case, I simply want to be able to add/remove text, and switch a few images. Rather uncomplicated - you would think.

However, every time I scroll past (without even touching) an image, it starts the entire 'performing page recognition' again - for the entire 80 page document. In every awful encouter I've had with this 'Auto OCR' (even docs with only a few pages) the process itself takes far too long and wastes time rather than saves it.

As of now, it's an annoyance and I'd prefer to turn it off completely, but even that doesn't seem possible.

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

You can disable this at Edit PDF:

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