Making a PDF Searchable?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
November 24, 2020
2 replies
1762 views

I use Adobe Acrobat DC Pro on. my mac --- if I get a 200/300 page document that I want to make searchable is that possible?

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Amal.

Community Manager

Hi Blumbizzle

Hope you are doing well and sorry for the trouble. As descibed, you want to make a document searchable.

++ Adding to the discussion

Are you trying to make a scanned document editable/searchable? If yes, Acrobat can easily turn your scanned documents into editable PDFs. When you open a scanned document for editing, Acrobat automatically runs OCR (optical character recognition) in the background and converts the document into editable image and text with correctly recognized fonts in the document. Also, a prompt on upper-right corner appears showing you the recognized OCR language. It also points you to the settings button if you want to change the OCR language.

By default, only the current page is converted to editable text instead of the entire document in one go. As you move from one page to another, the page in focus is made editable.

For more information please look at the help page https://helpx.adobe.com/in/acrobat/using/edit-scanned-pdfs.html

Hope this information will help

Regards

Amal

gary_sc

Community Expert

I'm sorry, what do you mean by 200/300. Is that the scanning dpi?

If so than yes, but the higher the number the better the end result. 600 dpi is maximum but only if it's optical resolution. If it's digital dpi, it's meaningless. Go to the max of your scanner.

B

BlumbizzleAuthor

New Participant

The 200/300 was just the page count of a document -- I was saying it's a large file, so I can't manually look through it. I'm trying to make it serachable, Thanks for your reply!

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Blumbizzle,

I think I need to take this from the top, there's a lot of cross information here and some of it has confused me. I apologize. The information from Amal only applies if you were using the Edit function, not if you were simply OCRing the entire document. I think you want the entire document OCRed, correct?

Has this file been scanned yet? If yes, what resolution was it scanned in (if you know)?

If not, what kind of scanner do you have and do you expect to have this many pages to scan on a regular basis?

The reason I ask is that that is a lot of pages to have to scan with a flatbed scanner (I know, I've done it) but if you do this on a regular basis, than investing in a bulk scanner is worth it in term of time spent (I know, I've used the FujiScan with great results). Be aware though that a bulk scanner demands that if you are scanning a book or magazine(s), you MUST destroy the item becuase you cannot feed a whole magazine or a whole book through a bulk scanner. Also be aware that if you are doing a book, the bent text toward the spine of the book makes quality OCR essentially impossible.

So please, as if we are starting from the beginning here, what do you have to work with? I look forward to hearing from you.

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