Seeking Help from Someone with Acrobat Pro 2020 Windows

[Walt Bilofsky]

I am trying to find out if the OCR in Acrobat Pro 2020 Windows will work better than 2017 on a project for our small museum.

We used Acrobat Pro 2017 to create flipbooks with 17 months of the newspaper for a naval station around the end of World War II. We want researchers to be able to search the flipbook. However, the OCR has a lot of errors even though the scans are crisp, and it generates special characters that hamper the flipbook's search. 

If you have Acrobat Pro 2020 for Windows and can spare a few minutes to help us, please PM me. I can email you a few sample pages to OCR and return. That will help us decide whether to update.

Thanks in advance.

[gary_sc]

Hi Walt,

First off, I'm a Mac guy but that doesn't make a difference. The capabilities of Acrobat Pro DC 2020 are the same on a Mac or a PC.

OCR-ing a scan is an amazing capability of and in itself. How the software can look at the features on a page and come up with recognizable readable text is truly amazing. But like all things in life, some aspects can give you better results and some give you worse. Or, more clearly stated, "garbage in garbage out." 

I do not know how YOU are doing your scanning but I've found that too many people, walk up to their scanner, set it for fast document mode, and are not fully sure of why the results were not all that good.

I wrote an article for Adobe that covers scanning issues that may help you.

http://photosbycoyne.com/Gary's_Help/Scanning/clean-scanning.html

If you have any questions after you've read this, let me know.

[Walt Bilofsky]

First, thanks to try67 who was kind enough to run a test for me. It looks like Acrobat 2020 Pro does a little better OCR job than 2017. But for our project, the big difference is that on occasional problem characters, 2017 inserts a special character that pastes into Word as a box around a question mark. This character breaks the search function of our cheap flipbook software. 2020 just inserts a '~'. So bottom line, with 2020 we can make our flipbooks searchable.

Gary, thanks for the link to your article. We ran some tests with color vs grayscale, keeping or dropping background, and different resolutions. in the end, dropping the background didn't seem to help in our case, so we scanned in color without processing in order to preserve the authentic look of the old newsprint. But I'll look at your article and maybe try some of your suggestions.