I have an Illustrator CS3 doc in which all text has been converted to outlines. (I wish I had an intelligent answer to the question of why I don't have the original doc with live text, but...) I remember seeing a post some time ago that explained how to change the outlines back into live text, which may have involved making a pdf or something, but I can't find that post anywhere in the Adobe forums. Does anyone know how to do this, if it can even be done? Thanks!
I'd sure like to see that post. 🙂 Once text is outlined it's no longer text. You'll need to retype it. I suppose you could use Acrobat Pro to OCR the file, but I can't imagine that would be worth the hassle unless there was a great deal of text.
I had to test it. Yes, you can use Acrobat Pro to OCR the text. First you'll need to rasterize the outlined text in AI (at 300dpi bitmap) and save as PDF. Then open in Acrobat and go to "Documents>OCR Text Recognition" to convert the image to text. Click "Edit" in the "Recognize Text dialog window and select "Formatted Text & Graphics" to view only the text in Acrobat. Save and re-open in AI. The text will be editable, but broken into individual words. You can cut multiple words to the clipboard then click with the text tool and paste, to merge the text into a contiguous sentence, but you'll lose the spaces. Exporting as text from Acrobat may be a better route.
I was able to use the OCR feature in Acrobat Pro, and it worked pretty well. Just a little retyping to do, which is nothing compared to having to retype the entire text-heavy thing. Thank you all for your help!
No, Illustrator was the way to go for this particular brochure. It's got lots of vector art in it with rich backgrounds. Maybe "text-heavy" was an overstatement, but there is still a lot of copy in there. I did win a design award for it, so it came out pretty good! :)
Hello, I just want to bring some update to this topic.
You can recreate your text back as editable object directly within Adobe Illustrator using recently published extension - Krasbit Recognition. It includes text recognition feature and is available at Adobe Exchange for free! Using the service also is free when you configure Google's API connection Key on your own. Otherwise you can use alternative connection API via trial or cheap prepaid codes.
I downloaded the free trial and tried to use the Outline-to-text tool inside Illustrator, but it doesn't seem to affect any of the outlined text in the document (and there's a lot of it). DO you have any idea why this happens?
The original file is a PDF, haven't tried with EPS or other formats so far.
I see. I think I have that font in my system, as I did a manual retyping and it appears to be identical. However I will try on other files and see if this is the problem.
Good luck! 🙂 By the way the file format shouldn't matter, whether it's PDF, EPS or AI. As long as your text is vector and you have that font installed this should work.
Sweet Christmas! Please stop spamming the same comment again and again.
As I tell my seven year old: just because you keep repeating what you want to be does not make it so. I can relate to "needing my text back". It happens to everyone from time to time (often in my 25 years of design). But sometimes you must find the font and retype. It's terrible but such is the nature of graphic design.
Adobe Retype has only been in the Sneak from Adobe Max so far.
Good luck and remember to please be considerate to your fellow users. You may find sympathy even without a solution if you are kind and reasonable to others.
If you know the font, you need to retype it, or if it is a pdf file, open in acrobat in highlight the text, and paste and arrrange according to your sample pdf.
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