OCR fails to recognize text sometimes

[Patrick248]

Me and my colleagues use the OCR function sometimes when trying to copy and paste text from our clients' documents. The issue that we run into is that sometimes when the pages have editable text on them and non-editable images with text, Acrobat will tell us that it could not perform recognition because it contains renderable text. This error has been addressed previously in other articles, but I am confused because I sent this pdf to my colleague and they were able to run the Recognize Text function without any issues.

Is there something that could be allowing some of us to run OCR and others to not? We are all using the most recent version of Acrobat DC for the desktop.

[Amal.]

Hi Patrick

Hope you are doing well and sorry for the trouble.

This message appears if the PDF document already contains the editable text. Obtain a copy of the document that does not contain editable text.

You may also try to convert the PDF to TIFF and back, and then rerun OCR as described on the help page https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/error-could-perform-recognition-acrobat.html

Let us know how it goes

Regards

Amal

[Patrick248]

Hi Amal,

Thank you for the advice. Yes, I have seen that this was the recommended solution in the article that was linked to after getting the error message. Separating every file into individual recognizable pages and then compiling them again for every case would be time consuming, especially when we are doing so on billable hours.

Since some of us are able to use the Recognize Text function even with the renderable text being there, I was wondering why this was permissable for some of our programs, yet others of us would get the error message. If all of us would be able to recognize the text from just the first pdf, then that would save a lot of time and just make things easier.

Do you have any ideas as to why some of our programs are able to Recognize Text when there's renderable text while others of us are not?

Thanks for any additional help!

Patrick

[Amal.]

Hi there

Please check the version of Acrobat other users are using. Go to Help > About Acrobat and make sure they are using the recent version 22.1.20169 .

Regards

Amal

[Patrick248]

Hi Amal,

I just confirmed with one of the people who is able to use the Recognize Text function on pdfs with renderable text, and we both are using Version 2022.001.20169. We also double checked in the Adobe Creative Cloud application and it says that our Acrobat apps are "Up to date".

Thank you for your continued help in this matter, but unfortunately I don't think the app version is the issue in this situation.

Patrick

[Amal.]

Hi there

Thanks for confirming that. Would you mind collecting the Adobe CC logs https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-log-collector.html  and procmon logs (Win Only) https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Labs/acromonitor.html  from the affected machine and share then via document cloud as described here https://helpx.adobe.com/document-cloud/help/sharing-pdfs.html for further investigation?

~Amal