Redaction not performing OCR

[Jewish Family5D9B]

I have a user who has Acrobat Pro 11 and uses redaction extensively.

Until recently, she's been able to go to the redaction tools, enter a string, and it would search the document for all instances of that string performing the OCR as it went along.

Something changed and now it can't find any strings unless she manually runs the OCR function beforehand.

I can't for the life of me find a setting that addresses this.

Does anybody have any idea what I need to do to fix it?

[gary_sc]

Can your friend select any text on the page BEFORE she tries to redact? When she does, does the whole page turn blue and she cannot select anything?

OCR is necessary if anyone is using a PDF that has not been made searchable. For example, taking a scan of a page of text and not OCRing that page will create such a document. If you try to redact on that page, nothing will happen becuase there is no TEXT on the page, only a photograph (scan) of text.

So the question is where is she getting these new documents? Is she scanning them? Is she getting them from another person who does not know they need to OCR the page before passing it onto your friend?

Simple, what you are writing all sounds normal. 

[Jewish Family5D9B]

These are definitely scans both from the courthouse and from our own copiers.

The issue is that previously the documents either got OCRed when she opened them or it was set off automatically when she did a search-and-redact.

Last week someone monked with her settings and now she has to manually OCR each document before she can search-and-redact.

It's doing this for ALL documents, even ones that other members of her team are able to search without manually running the OCR first.

[Jewish Family5D9B · Accepted solution]

We uninstalled it and removed all Adobe folders in appdata, then reinstalled it.

When she tries to do a redaction search it now pops up and tells her about scanned documents and offers to recognize text and there is a checkbox to not ask again.

I'm pretty sure she has checked that box and told it no and that's what started this.

I still have no idea where the setting to reverse that decision is found in Acrobat XI that is; it's pretty easy to find in DC. 

When she goes to search for a string to redact, it now will do the OCR on the fly as it searches.

[gary_sc]

I do not know if you are still dealing with this but recently I discovered something very interesting: If you scan a document and save it as a JPG or PNG, and drag open it in Acrobat, it will convert that document into a PDF and then stop. If you want the document also OCRed, you must do another step in that process. 

However #1): IF you save that same document as a TIF, and open it in Acrobat, it will convert it to PDF AND OCR the document automatically.

However #2): If you go into Acrobat's Preferences and then scroll to Convert to PDF and click on it

Then click on TIFF, and then click on Edit Settings, you get this:

If Scan Optimization is unchecked, than after converting a TIF into a PDF, the OCR process will not happen. To fix this, just recheck it. But this only works with a TIF image format.

Again, I do not know if your issue is resolved or not but this might be the solution.

Let me know.