How to fix OCR when text has not been recognised?

[fishtail101]

Hi!

I have a map of old place names. I want to be able to "search" for a place name and find out if it appears on this map. I know it will take a lot of work to enter all of the place names manually, but I use the map often enough that I think it's worth it to avoid having to eyeball the whole map to see if I can see a word somewhere. I have tried using OCR, but it doesn't actually realise that 95% of the writing on the map is text, so I can't just correct recognised areas which have been recognised as text using the "Correct recognised text" feature - most of the text on the map was not recognised as text by the OCR process. I am thinking that surely there is a way to manually identify areas of text which the OCR "recognise Text" process did not pick up - anyone know how??

[JR Boulay]

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[Dave__M]

One possible alternate way to achieve what you want may be to create a bookmark for each point/place on the map that you want one to be able to find.  A bookmark remembers a place and magnification.  So if you have a map of the US, you could zoom in on Montana, and create a bookmark called Montana. If one clicks on that bookmark, it would take them to that memorized zoom of that portion of the map.

This may not be a viable solution for you, but perhaps it could make a tough situation a little easier.

My best,

Dave

[fishtail101]

Thanks Dave, that's actually a good idea. Would help a bit at least. Do you know if bookmarks are searchable?? I'm looking at possibly hundreds of place names... Thanks

[Dave__M]

In Acrobat, use the Advanced Search (vs. Find).  There is an option there to include bookmarks for the search parameters.

My best,

Dave

[fishtail101]

Fabulous, thank you!!

[maxwithdax]

There is. This is where accessibility might be a good approach. You can actually highlight text and tag it if it is selectable. You would want to use the content panel to evaluate if your document was a good candidate. Without seeing the file it would be hard for me to tell you exactly how but it is possible. You would want to work with someone who knows accessibility to help get you started in the process of manually tagging the document. Let me know if you are interested. I would be happy to volunteer my time.

[fishtail101]

Thanks maxwithdax. The main problem is that there are chunks of text which it's not even picking up as text - so I couldn't do what you suggest and highlight/tag text which is already selectable. Any idea how to fix that?? Is it possible to tag things which have not been already identified as text?