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OCR Scanning and Text Recognition in Adobe Acrobat Screwing Up Documents

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
October 14, 2020
3 replies
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I spend, or ratehr waste hours and hours designing nice documents in real design software, which I then have to convert to PDF and create fillable form fields so end users can user them. Adobe Acrobat will out of the blue, for no reason, no prompting, without warning, just start scaning the document and CONVERTING IT! It screws up my text fields, changes placement, position, size. It screws up the font settings in the fields and in short makes a mess or all of the work I just spent a good bit of time doing. I have to do it all over. Adobe screws it up again. I have used tech support to try to get a solution or at least a workaround for this. Not much help. All they could do is tell me to turn on "recognize text" - well that is what I want it NOT to do - I want the darned thing to stop scanning! Support then told me to use a different acrobat peroduct. Welll if a different Adobe product could do what I needed don't you think I would be using it! Also Adobe will not let you install more than one version of Acrobat on the computer - what - am I supposed to keep installing and uninstalling and swapping software while I work. That is ridiculous! Adobe - please get rid of this horrible monstrosity. It has ruined what used to be a working product. Totally screwing up my work! I am on the verge of tears everyday from the HOURS I spend that are ruined!

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gary_sc

Community Expert

I'm still trying to figure out what happened to your process.

Is there any chance you can send us a copy of one of your forms? That would help a lot in trying to figure out what happened/ing.

BTW, you really might want to check out creating your forms in InDesign and then export as an Interactive PDF. It is much faster, easier and much more accurate than I think you've been led to believe.

Dave__M

Community Expert

If you haven't visited it yet, I would open up your Acrobat preferences, and be sure you turn off the Automatically detect form fields option shown below.

My best,

Dave

Alchemy MuseAuthor

New Participant

Yes, I have been working with that turned off, but thank you very much for your suggestion.

Dave__M

Community Expert

I'll keep 'fishing'. Good luck.

Dave

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Alchemy,

Sheesh, sounds horible. You have my sympathies.

[Side point: IF you are on a Mac and IF you have Time Machine set up, can you go back to get your original document? If no on either account, please ignore this small bit.]

In all of the years I've used Acrobat (about 25 at this point), I've never seen Acrobat suddenly start to OCR a page a standard pages of text and/or form. On the other hand, if the page you created for the form was not searchable text, rather a picture of the page you were working on and/or had pictures of text, than yes, the OCR would automatically start up.

Can you please tell us what is your "real design software" being used to create your nice documents? Also, how are you converting to PDF? Specifically, how are you doing that? What menu commands are you using?

Lastly, what version of Acrobat are you using (and what release) and what is your OS (and what release)?

Alchemy MuseAuthor

New Participant

Wow, excuse my poor typing above! I create documents, layouts, graphics using Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher, and I create some things using Microsoft Word. I have to jump through a lot of hoops to get a final product with the graphic quality and resolution I need. It must have form fields so that the end users can personalize it, and add their own content. Those form fields are why I need Adobe Acrobat for this project. I suppose I could use In-Design and Photoshop instead of Affinity, but it would still have to be converted to PDF and form fields added in Acrobat. Your quastion about how I convert to PDF: In MS Word I select 1) "Save As" and 2) select "PDF" (this is the method by which Word will send the embedded fonts to PDF). In Affinity the process is 1) Export and 2) select PDF.
I am using the current Acrobat Pro DC downloaded from Creative Cloud. I am on Windows 10, current version, all updates applied. Also per the post below about turning off "Automatically Detect Form Fields" - yes I have been working with the turned off.

Alchemy MuseAuthor

New Participant

P.S> When I try to correct what Adobe messed up just after it scanned, as soon as I touch a field to work on it, it starts scanning again, and messed it up again.

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