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dennisc2907415
New Participant
August 16, 2017
Answered

Help WORD SEARCH in pdf documents is not working.

  • August 16, 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 12027 views

Help  WORD SEARCH in pdf documents is not working.  I use Adobe XI Standard.  What can I do to restore this function?

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer ~graffiti

    Kind of hard to know for sure what's going on without a lot of info but one thing to try. Using the select tool, try highlighting an individual word in the pdf file? If you cannot do that, then there is no text to search for. It is a scanned image.

    Using Acrobat Standard I believe you can run Optical Character Recognition to fix that but that is best taken to the Acrobat forum rather than here in the forum for the free Reader software.

    4 replies

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    Caprica1
    New Participant
    December 7, 2019

    I am a stamp collector. I'm using the find function to find the stamp and get some particulars about the stamps. The find function works 95% of the time. The other 5% the find function does not find the word I as searching for.

    In the below image, I can highlight a word which means adobe will find this word.

     

    In the below image, when I try to highligh Damaster, I get a double line highlight and adobe will not find it.

    How can I get a single line highlighted? Any help would be appreciated since manually searching through 1500 pages to find 1 stamp is very tiring.

    Cheers

     

    try67
    try67
    Community Expert
    December 8, 2019

    This is the result of creating a PDF from a page that was scanned at a poor quality and/or low resolution, and because of that the Text Recognition (OCR) process is not able to identify all the words in it correctly. Basically, unless you have access to the original pages and can scan them at a better quality, or to a better OCR engine, there's nothing you can do about it, especially not with the free Reader.

    M
    mirekdbn
    New Participant
    October 19, 2019

    I have the same problem, I think it happened after mandatory Windows updates but not sure. Can you provide more info on Optical Character Recognition ? Does it mean that I have to convert the file in the special converter for search option to start working again ? Thank you. 

    Claudio González
    Claudio González
    Brainiac
    August 16, 2017

    "Not working" can mean many different things. Full details please. Can you select a few words in the text?

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    dennisc2907415Author
    New Participant
    August 16, 2017

    Up to five days ago I was able to search for individual words or phrases in Adobe (pdf) documents.
    If the document was am image I was asked if I wanted to do an OCS scan.  To which I responded yes. 

    Five days ago, I noticed a box to check if I didn’t want this question asked again.  Foolishly I checked the box thinking it would automatically scan the pdf image in the future.  How do I restore the OCS scan?. 

    ~graffiti
    ~graffiti
    Brainiac
    August 16, 2017

    Well, you don't need the box to pop up. You can just open the scanned pdf file and go to All Tools>Text recognition>Recognize text in this file.

    ~graffiti
    ~graffitiCorrect answer
    Brainiac
    August 16, 2017

    Kind of hard to know for sure what's going on without a lot of info but one thing to try. Using the select tool, try highlighting an individual word in the pdf file? If you cannot do that, then there is no text to search for. It is a scanned image.

    Using Acrobat Standard I believe you can run Optical Character Recognition to fix that but that is best taken to the Acrobat forum rather than here in the forum for the free Reader software.

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