No OCR with Adobe Acrobat Standard DC?

[peterd73339639]

In previous Adobe versions, I was able to apply optical character recognition (OCR) so that I could cut and paste text directly from a *.pdf file, no matter how it was generated. With Acrobat Standard DC, this functionality appears to have been lost. As a specific example, if you download a patent document in *.pdf format from google patents, the document is clearly readable, but Adobe says "...this page doesn't have editable text. If it is a scanned page, convert it to another format using the Export PDF tool." But I don't want to export it to another format, which generates another file in *.doc or some other format, for no good reason. In the good old days, it was possible to request OCR and it worked just fine within the *.pdf document. Or is there a hidden trick to this?

[Priyanja · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your report.

Edit PDF uses "Editable Text & Images" type of OCR which is not available in Acrobat Standard.

However you can use other OCR  methods like Searchable Image and  Searchable Image (Exact) for copying text from scanned documents.

Steps for running OCR in Acrobat Standard are :

1. Open the scanned PDF.

2. Choose Tools > Enhance Scans > Recognize Text > In This File.

The Recognize Text options are displayed in the Secondary toolbar.

3. In the Secondary toolbar, select a page range and language for text recognition.

4. Optionally, click Settings to open the Recognize Text dialog box, and specify the options as needed.

5. Click Recognize Text. Acrobat creates a layer of text in your PDF that can be searched — or copied and pasted into a new document.

Hope this works for you .

Regards,

Priyanka

[dalebowmanmclarens]

I am trying this now and we'll see how well it works.  The old way was a bit more intuitive.  I just hope this gives equal if not better results.  It does have a correct OCR text in the event of an error. 

I appreciate this article.  I know a lot of people will look for it.  Having to export it to another format is not a good solution.

If the file is "saved" after the OCR, will it remain embedded in the file for future use? 

I use this feature almost daily on documents of one page to nearly 1,000 pp.

Dale