Acrobat OCR/scanning questions

[davids47949196]

Two questions:

1 - When I click Edit for a scanned pdf in Reader, it forces me to login.  Does this mean my document is being sent to the cloud for scanning?  My client doesn't want their data leaving their network.

2 - Is it reasonable to have an archive of a few hundred one-page pdf files on a file system, and then use Reader to search them for various terms?  I read something about a catalog index feature which I assume means that acrobat will index the directory once and then create an index.

Thanks

[~graffiti]

First, you are saying "Acrobat" and "Reader". We need to know which one it is.

Your choices are

1. Adobe Acrobat
2. Adobe Acrobat Reader

It sounds like you are using Acrobat Reader. On it's own, it can not "Edit" a pdf file. That is an additional cloud service that you purchase separately (that's why it wants you to log in) and yes, the documents will not be processed locally on your machine. Plus, it is a limited service. You mostly cannot "Edit" a pdf as such but you can use it to convert pdf's to Word documents that can be edited, OCR scanned documents...etc. For full editing abilities, you would need to purchase Adobe Acrobat and open the pdf files in that.

Hope that helps.

[davids47949196]

I should have clarified originally that my objective is to find documents that contain certain terms, where I have a few thousand documents in a directory(s).  I am NOT interesting in editing the documents.  But the adobe interface appears to avoid the term 'OCR' and makes me think that in order to OCR a document I have to click 'Edit'. 

I'm not clear on the branding of the various products, I'll purchase whatever product I need to achieve the objective.  I believe when I did this test at the office that I was using a trial version of Reader or Pro, I don't recall.

Thanks

[~graffiti]

If you want to search the documents, you will need to OCR them if they are scans. Adobe Acrobat Reader cannot do that. That "Edit" button simply takes you to a place to purchase Adobe Acrobat. You would need to use the full version of Acrobat to use OCR.

[davids47949196]

As noted above, i'm happy to buy whatever adobe product could do this.  thanks.

[Bernd Alheit]

With Adobe Acrobat Pro you can create a search catalog.

[davids47949196]

Is catalog performance sufficient for the parameters I gave in my question or is it only designed for small document collections?  this is the heart of my second question.

Is there no answer for my first question?  I'm about to give up on this platform.  it's so difficult to find answers to what I thought were relatively simple questions.  Is there no way to talk to adobe sales to get answers to such questions?

thanks

[Bernd Alheit · Accepted solution]

Search catalog is for large PDF collections.

The first was already answered.

[Test Screen Name]

Acrobat OCRs locally. If your collection is "large" (more than dozens of files) this may be painful and tedious. Once you get to hundreds, Acrobat is not the right sort of tool.

[davids47949196]

Thanks, we would only be ocr'ing a dozen or so documents a day, and eventually the collection would grow to a few thousand.  one page per document.

[~graffiti]

davids47949196  wrote

Is there no answer for my first question? 

I answered it almost immediately. Please read all of the posts.

[davids47949196]

I think my two original questions remain unanswered:

1 - can i use any adobe product to OCR the documents locally?

2 - will performance be reasonable (say five seconds or less) to search for terms in a few thousand one-page pdf files stored in a local folder?

thanks

[Bernd Alheit]

2 - You can use Edit > Advanced Search