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robert_lewis00980
Participant
September 28, 2025
Answered

Unable to Highlight Text Properly in Scanned PDF Files

  • September 28, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 359 views

Hi everyone,

 

I often work with scanned PDF documents and I’ve noticed that the highlight tool in Adobe Acrobat doesn’t work the way it does with normal PDFs. Instead of smoothly highlighting the text, it either highlights unevenly or selects the entire image area.

 

I’ve already tried using OCR to recognize the text, but even after running OCR, some parts of the document don’t respond properly to the highlight tool.

 

Has anyone else faced this issue? Is there a reliable way to make scanned PDFs fully text-selectable so I can highlight them just like a regular PDF?

 

Any guidance would be appre

ciated.

 

Correct answer creative explorer

@robert_lewis00980 on my end, it use to be a nice highlight and now I see a underline! I went into my Acrobat Preferences and turn off every single 'Commenting' that says anything with regards to 'Highlights' 


For your issue, you need to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Go to the Tools menu. Find and select Enhance Scans or Recognize Text (sometimes found under "Edit PDF").

Choose "Recognize Text in This File" (or in multiple files/all pages). Run the OCR process. This creates an invisible, searchable text layer behind the image. Save the document after OCR is complete. After performing the OCR step, the Highlight Tool should function correctly, placing a solid color block behind the newly recognized text layer. This should fix it

1 reply

creative explorer
Community Expert
creative explorerCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
September 29, 2025

@robert_lewis00980 on my end, it use to be a nice highlight and now I see a underline! I went into my Acrobat Preferences and turn off every single 'Commenting' that says anything with regards to 'Highlights' 


For your issue, you need to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Go to the Tools menu. Find and select Enhance Scans or Recognize Text (sometimes found under "Edit PDF").

Choose "Recognize Text in This File" (or in multiple files/all pages). Run the OCR process. This creates an invisible, searchable text layer behind the image. Save the document after OCR is complete. After performing the OCR step, the Highlight Tool should function correctly, placing a solid color block behind the newly recognized text layer. This should fix it

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