Turn off OCR

[psurazz]

Another little unwelcome feature in Acrobat DC for Mac is the constant OCR function. I work in architectural drawings. These rarely require character recognition. A lot of these drawings now are rendered from Revit, so the file sizes are starting to be gargantuan with all the additional data. The first drawing I opened in Acrobat DC, I thought it would never open, I just kept seeing a small status bar at the lower portion of the page.

I finally found a Preference to "control" the OCR a little better and restrict to Current Page. But, even then, give the drawings I deal with, each time I flip to a new page, it's a very long delay. Sometimes I just want to scan quickly. In previous versions of Acrobat Professional, the user had the option of scanning a document. Why was that option taken away?

I have found myself using the OS X application Preview more and more since installing DC to jump through architectural drawings. Is there any way to make OCR scanning an option, and not default in Acrobat Professional DC?

[Anubha Goel]

Hey psurazz,

Could you please open Acrobat and go to "File > Create > PDF from Scanner > Configure Presets" and uncheck 'Recognize Text' option.

This would stop running OCR in your document automatically.

Let me know how it goes.

Regards,

Anubha

[psurazz]

I did that. I'll see how it goes, but I'm skeptical.  There is a drop down asking for a scanner name. I'm not scanning. Also, if I uncheck "Recognize Text" The Confirm button stays greyed out. Probably because I didn't select a scanner. My only option is Cancel. In my world, when I click Cancel, it means just that. Cancel. So, I'll take this under advisement, but I'm not sure it'll default to turning off the OCR by default for ever document I open.

[MrBB Print]

I'm having the same issue. For large PDF file I have to wait for Acrobat to do something I don't need - OCR. If I want OCR I can do it myself.

Nanny Adobe at your service.

[Peto]

This is my issue too. I work with many drawings from ArchiCAD or AutoCAD and somtimes Acrobat just freeze for a moment while scaning for text recognition what I don't need. I don't know how to turn this unwanted feature

[Dudemang33_3]

There should really be an off-switch for this feature. I find it to be NOT nifty.

[brian7997]

This really sucks.  I want to move a logo and when I try and grab it, the logo is recognized as text and converts part of the logo to a raster image - Grr. and I don't have the original font to open it in illustrator. In 95% of cases ocr probably is nice for scanned documents but this is such pain when it doesn't work correctly. Maybe a toggle to prompt would be appropriate...

[  ] prompt if text is recognized

And id settings there should be

[  ] disable OCR (in editing too)

[flyovergreg]

Ditto. I need to peruse hundreds of historical deeds (late 1700s-early 1800s) scanned by various government entities and many need to be cropped. Having to wait for each to FAIL to OCR just by clicking 'Edit' is a nuisance that is driving me nutty. Horrible assumption on Adobe's part that OCR is even possible on many PDFs.

Click "Edit", then take a break, then resume work. Barf.

Using Windows Adobe Pro DC.

[Sherry @ Lacy & Par]

Apparently we are going to need to request the ability to turn off this "feature" using the Feature Request/Bug Report Form

In the meantime, I was informed if you right-click on the open document and select "Add Text", you will enter Edit mode without triggering the OCR. THEN you can exit back to document and edit images as you would have normally. Weird.

SOoo... I'm definitely going to submit a bug report form. It should NEVER have defaulted to OCR!

[rinconmike]

Any idea when this will be fixed.  I just started using Acrobat DC and hate it.  XI is better, but I needed another license so got DC.

[Sherry @ Lacy & Par]

No idea... but it would help if everyone fills out the bug report form in the link I supplied in message 8, above. Strength in numbers, eh?

In the meantime, you can use the work around I supplied. It's clunky, but it works.

I hope they fix this soon.

[yukh]

I found the solution of similar trouble for Windows (just for any case):

Remove the Accessibility plugins from Acrobat/Reader

If you do not require any accessibility features in Acrobat/Reader and you have not been successful disabling the dialog using the methods above, then you can always close Acrobat/Reader and remove the Accessibility.api and ReadOutLoud.api from the plugins folder.  You should keep a copy of these plugins in another folder as a backup.  When you restart Acrobat/Reader it should no longer display this dialog.

Acrobat/Reader: how to disable the “Reading Untagged Document” dialog

[psurazz]

This sounds like a great tip. On the Mac side I couldn't find any plug-ins. I dug deep into you User/Library/Application Support/Adobe. All of the Plug-in folders were empty. I thought that in itself was a bit odd. Thanks for the tip however. It was worth giving a try on the Mac side.

[OsakaWebbie]

Since I'm on Windows 10, I tried the suggestion about removing plugins - I found the plugins (I'm on Windows 10) and added a suffix of ".disabled" to the filenames. But it still did the recognition thing when I re-opened Acrobat on a document and chose "Edit Text and Images".

I also tried glowbug1981's suggestion of the "Enable assistive technology support" setting - that sounded promising, but also didn't work.

[Erica Frank]

I'm looking into open-source software to crop PDFs, because I work with a lot of scanned receipts that need to be cropped down to 1 per page. Of course, the originals are low-quality, several to a page, and often skewed or sideways. The auto-OCR picks a line it thinks is "main text," and skews everything else. (I think there's a way to turn that off... individually for each file as I open it. Couldn't find a place to keep those settings.)

I'll be looking for an old unopened copy of X or XI on ebay or amazon, and telling my boss we can stop paying for the DC subscription because it doesn't do what we need it to. If they ever fix this feature, we'll consider subscribing again.

WHAT MORON IN MARKETING DECIDED THAT AUTO-OCR WAS A TERRIFIC REQUIRED FEATURE FOR ALL PDFS? Are they trying to drive everyone who works with image-based PDFs to other software companies?

[mihae42331112]

Try using Revert to image option under Edit PDF tools, before you actually edit the image.

It seems to work in my case.

[Lisa3060]

Re: Try using Revert to image option under Edit PDF tools, before you actually edit the image.

It seems to work in my case.

This worked for me. After it scanned and changed my image, this option came up on the right side and looks like this.

[rtdrtrtydh · Accepted solution]

It's WORKING!!!

This is actually the ANSWER!!!

Why is the question staying as Not Answered???

Why is the admin sleeping and making so many poeple confused?

• Once you open a file
• wait for its auto OCR process,
• in the Edit PDF choose "Revert to image" under SCANNED DOCUMENTS.
• That's all!

After closing and opening any other document I see no auto OCR anymore.

Enjoy!

(Version Acrobat DC 2017.012.20098)

[Ken C. 73]

This answer is not helpful because it attempts to scan the entire document before it allows you to hit the Revert button. If you are opening extremely large documents, it takes a while before you can revert and sometimes it crashes the application.

[monsonjim]

Yes! This crashes every time I try the above "solution." In my latest version of Acrobat Pro there is no "Edit PDF," only "Edit Text and Images," and when I choose that it consistently crashes. Adobe has apparently chosen to ignore all of us who struggle with this non-wanted automatic feature. I have found over the years that Adobe is trying to too much and that they simply do not listen to users, who have no other choice that to use products such as Acrobat Pro. Why must they take an easy to use product, make it complex and non-intuative, and the not listen to its users?

[glowbug1981]

Go to Edit --> Preferences --> Accessibility and uncheck "Enable assistive technology support." This fixed the issue on my version without deleting any plug-ins.

[Paul_Rogers]

Uninstall DC and reinstall XI. 

[terryg91721807]

On Windows 10, I ended up (after trying a couple of other things listed here) right-clicking my document and selecting Open With Acrobat Pro DC, rather than Edit.  It seemed to do the trick, although it's possible one of the other things I tried first may have helped.  Not sure at this point.  Certainly there should be a setting to turn this off. 

[electropithecus]

Seriously. I can't figure this out either. It's so annoying. I just need to add text fields to pages, but as soon as I go into Edit mode it scans and converts everything. I don't need this and want to turn it off.

[andys17762500]

Worst and most annoying feature EVER.  Not only does it scan text, it seems to auto rotate images when it feels like it.  It also alters the format overall slightly. 

I'm a frigging commercial printer.  This makes it a useless product for me.  I can't trust it with client art. 

What on Earth was Adobe thinking????

The default should be disabled, and we should have a default option in the first place.  It cannot be turned off as near as I can tell.