Searching text of pdf

[suzanner44792545]

I'm unable to search a pdf that I've opened in Acrobat Reader (I have an Export account).  When I do, the response is always that the text phrase cannot be found (even though it IS in the document).  Do I need to convert the document?  Or do something else to enable it to be searched?  Please advise.  Thanks.

[~graffiti]

That depends. The most common cause for not being able to search a pdf is because the pdf is a scanned document which only contains images and no live text to search for. You need to run Optical Character Recognition to convert it back to text. Adobe Acrobat Reader does not have that ability.

[suzanner44792545]

Via my "Export" account, do I have the ability to run OCR?  I can convert the document to RTF or even to Word -- must I do that?  If I were to upgrade my account in some way, would that enable me to search the document for text phrases?  Or to save it in a different format that would be searchable?  Thanks!

[~graffiti · Accepted solution]

With Adobe ExportPDF, you should be able to perform OCR on pdf files. Here are instructions on how to do that: Using OCR in Adobe Export PDF, Document Cloud, Reader

[suzanner44792545]

I’ve now converted a document to RTF but it’s still not finding the text in a search!?  It also looks very different….

Suzanne Rosencrans

Black Label Media

(Edited by Moderator to remove personal info)

[try67]

Can you select the text word by word, or does it select the entire page at once? If the latter, then it's an image, not actual text.

You would need Adobe Acrobat to run Text Recognition on it and convert it to real, selectable text.

[~graffiti]

suzanner44792545  wrote

I’ve now converted a document to RTF but it’s still not finding the text in a search!?  It also looks very different….

Yes. It would look different but, why did you convert to RTF? If you have Adobe ExportPDF, try converting to a Word document. You'll get better results...