I am working with an electrical schematic for one of our machines. Engineering would like to have the schematic text to be searchable, but the CAD software used doesn't output editable text when saved as a pdf. The schematic is an E72 size print (71.5" x 33.5"). I am using Acrobat Pro DC and it's up to date. The computer I'm running it on is an HP Z4 workstation running Win 10 for Workstations, and 4GB Intel Xeon processor and 32GB of RAM.
When I run OCR on the pdf, I get an error that I have insufficient memory. The only things I have running are a Windows explorer window, Acrobat, and Outlook. I've tried several times and still get the error.
The Adobe solution is to save it as a .tiff file and open the .tiff file with Acrobat. I attemp to save it as a .tiff and I get an error that the image is too wide. Please crop or reduce resolution and try again. No, the whole point is to have the resolution be large and crisp so the user can zoom in and see everything. Acrobat has no trouble opening and printing the file on a plotter. Fine, open it in Illustrator and save out as a .tiff. No problem for Illustrator at all. Ok, I saved it out as a .tiff and open it with Acrobat, which opens this large .tiff just fine. Run OCR- Acrobat could not perform recognition because: This page contains renderable text. Oh really?! I don't know how since its a raster file now!
I then take it into Illustrator again. I divide the pdf into four quarters. I figure I can OCR each section and splice it back together in Illustrator. I run OCR on the first quarter and the results are horrendous! Terribly illegible blobs for text, which are in no way searchable, but the OCR completed it's job! I then scale the size of the pdf down by 50%. I run OCR and the text is a pixelated mess!
What in the world is going on with this software? Is there anything else I can do?
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