OCRd pages causing "Acrobat may not display the page correctly"

Report · Oct 05, 2017

Hi all,

I'm currently faced with an issue where pages with handwriting on them are causing Reader to display the following error:

"An error exists on this page. Acrobat may not display the page correctly. Please contact the person who created the PDF to correct the problem".

I've been able to determine it only occurs when certain pages - with handwriting - are OCRd. If those pages are turned to images it works fine. Is the error message intentional? - ie. is Reader advising "we can't be 100% sure the OCR of handwriting is correct"?

The end result I'm after is a searchable OCRd document - ideally with handwritten text searchable (particularly for dates). However at no point in time do I want to provide a document to a client that states "Acrobat may not display the page correctly" as they client's can no longer trust the accuracy of the document. I understand OCR may not be accurate (thus the intention to search date fields may be moot). So if we can still achieve the same result, with just the handwritten portions not being OCRd that would be great - is this achievable?

Thanks,

Report · Oct 06, 2017

What software and options are you using to OCR? Reader doesn't do that, so something else must be involved. Handwriting OCR is unlikely to work.

Report · Oct 06, 2017

Sorry - that would have been helpful. I've used Acrobat DC as well as PDFDocs. The handwriting end up selectable, though I admit I've not yet copied and pasted to see what characters it believed it recognised. Regardless of whether the handwriting will be accurately OCRd - I'd still like to keep the page's text searchable (outside of the handwriting).

Print to PDF alleviates the error message but will replace these pages as images, thus making them unsearchable.

Report · Oct 06, 2017

Ok, this is almost certainly a bug in Acrobat (the PDF producer) rather than Reader (the PDF viewer). Probably best reported to Adobe, but if you'd like the experts here to have a go at the problem I recommend this forum: Scanning & OCR

When you post, be sure to include the exact version of Acrobat, how the PDF was scanned, and the options used for OCR. If you are able to share the PDF that is likely to increase the chances of useful advice.

Report · Jan 18, 2018

Can you please share some sample documents where you are getting this error. Please share the original and OCRed document.

Thanks.