Selectively delete comments to undo accidental OCR?

Question

Hello,

While working on a PDF in Adobe Acrobat on a series of scanned documents, I accidentally ran the OCR scan. There is now 4800 comments that slow and crash Adobe when I try to naviaget or add any new markups. I have also added bookmarks that I don't want to lose or have to redo as they had to be added manually. I tried using the Remove Hidden Information tool, but then all the bookmarks were lost and it doesn't seem like there's a way to just select the comments/markups. Is there a workaround?

Thanks!

try67 · Accepted Answer

Still no luck, even ticking and unticking it.

Try running this code (from the JS Console, or a Custom Command):

this.syncAnnotScan();
var annots = this.getAnnots();
if (annots!=null) {
	for (var i=annots.length-1; i>=0; i--) {
		var annot = annots[i];
		annot.setProps({lock: false, readOnly: false});
		annot.destroy();
	}
}

Play Bad29291609ynfe · Answer

If you have accidentally run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on an image and want to selectively delete comments in a PDF, you can follow these steps:

Open the PDF in a PDF editor: Use a PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat or Foxit PhantomPDF to open the PDF.
Open the comments panel: Locate and open the comments panel in the PDF editor. The comments panel will show all the comments that have been added to the PDF.
Select the comments to delete: Use the comment selection tool to select the comments that you want to delete. You can hold down the Ctrl key to select multiple comments.
Delete the selected comments: Once you have selected the comments, right-click and choose "Delete" to remove them from the PDF.
Save the changes: After you have deleted the comments, save the changes to the PDF.

By following these steps, you can selectively delete comments in a PDF to undo accidental OCR. However, keep in mind that this will only remove the comments and will not undo the OCR process itself. If you want to remove the OCR text from the PDF, you will need to use a PDF editing tool with OCR functionality to revert the changes.

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