I need to OCR scan a lot of receipts and some are pretty faded

[Kurtk7]

I tried scanning different test receipts but it completely ignored the main body and only picked up the banks footer message.  Is there a way to have Acrobat enhance and pick up on the text.  It's dot matrix created.  Any scanning and editing suggestions appreciated.

[gary_sc]

Hi Kurt,

Keep in mind that Acrobat itself has no scanning capabiity by itself whatsoever. It relies upon the scanner's software to do all the work. And if you're having issues, you will have to do some work yourself. That is, if you're not getting what you want by push-button scanning, than you will have to go in and change some settings. Depending on the ability of the scanner's software, you might be able to save these settings for "receipts" (or whatever you want to call them).

Here is a blog I wrote for Adobe some time back and this will go significantly further than you need but should be able to proivde a direction as to what's needed to get the entire receipt scanned. 

One thing that should help you is that you do not indicate whether you are using a flat-bed scanner or a feed scanner (such as is used for self-feeding a bunch of pages into a scanner). But if you are using a flat bed scanner, you might consider putting a slight gray paper over the receipt so the scanner can see the edges of the receipt. Since most scanners I've seen have a very white back, this might be causing some confusion for the auto-sensing part of the scanner's software. Might as well make it easier!

Here's the blog:

http://photosbycoyne.com/Gary's_Help/Scanning/clean-scanning.html

Good luck!

[Kurtk7]

Hello Gary

I appreciate the detailed response and to fill in a few blanks, I found flat bed scanners too slow and searched until I found a sheet fed Canon DR-C225 Twain scanner.  It appeared to have the best reviews and stated good OCR tendencies reported down to 6 pt font.  I have been trying different settings to enhance the text aspect but having a wide variety of results.  I tried your article suggestions on background removal but the switch to black and white or greyscale removed the text as it is in blue.  I would be happy to get an alternate scanner with my only concern being speed as flat beds are very slow at scanning, though may give better results. Any recommendations would be appreciated.