Searchable Text

Question

I am frequently using scanned documents.  Sometimes they are OCR'd during the scanning process, and sometimes they are not.  In the latter case, I must convert them to searchable.  Currently I "convert" them by selecting "edit," which begins a conversion process.  This takes a long time, so my first question is whether there is a better (i.e., more efficient) way?  My main question is this:  In either case, depending on the quality of the original, sometimes there are a lot of errors, even though the original scan is visible.  Clearly there is a layer of searchable text.  How can that layer be accessed in order to correct the OCR conversion errors?  I am using Acrobat Pro DC (desktop version).  Thanks

gary_sc · Answer

Hi Mark,

Yes, if you click on Edit, you will get your OCR, but as you observed, that's a painful way to do it.

If you have one file, you can select the "Scan and OCR" tool, and across the top, you'll see the option to just recognize the text of a single document — or — if you have a folder of documents, you can have it process the whole folder. I'm sorry, but I do not have the time to verify the following: if you have mixed documents, it will just skip the already OCRed documents. (It may also stop at that point; there have been changes in how Acrobat does things over the years, and I cannot be sure about which fork the current version takes.)

You're looking for this after selecting the Scan and OCR tool:

Good luck!

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