- Adobe Acrobat Pro’s optical character recognition feature converts scanned documents into editable PDFs. Just click on the Edit PDF tool to create a fully editable copy with searchable text.
- Use the file selection box at the top of the page to select the files in which you want to recognize text. Change the settings to tell the app how the text recognition should work. Start the recognition by pressing the corresponding button. Press the Download button to save the PDFs with recognized text.
- Introduction
- This tutorial shows how to make scanned PDF documents searchable using 'Recognize Text' operation available in the Adobe® Acrobat® software. Originally, the scanned PDF documents do not contain any searchable text. Each page is just an image. The 'Recognize Text' operation (also known as 'Optical Character Recognition' or OCR) processes each page and creates an invisible layer of text that can be searched or copied and pasted into a new document. The searchable text is added behind the page image, so the visual appearance of the pages does not change.
- Why Recognize Text?
- If the document does not have any searchable text, then it significantly limits its functinality. The document cannot be used for any text-based processing such as automated bookmarking and linking, text search and extraction, keyword-based redacting and etc.
- Is my PDF searchable?
- Open the PDF document in the Adobe® Acrobat® and try to select any text on the page with a selection tool. If you can highlight a text string and copy/paste it into a text editor (such as the Notepad, Microsoft Word or Outlook), then the document does contain a searchable text. If you cannot highlight a text on the page, then the document is not searchable.
- Scanning Quality
- To apply 'Recognize Text' operation to a PDF, the original scanner resolution must have been set at 72 dpi or higher. Note that scanning at 300 dpi produces the best text for conversion. At 150 dpi, OCR accuracy is slightly lower.
- Prerequisites
- You need a copy of the Adobe® Acrobat® installed on your computer in order to use this tutorial. You can download trial version of the Adobe® Acrobat®.
High Quality PDF OCR Apps for Mac. Microsoft office suite for mac 2018. To OCR PDF documents on mac, we will need to apply the OCR technology, which helps to recognize texts from image-based files and turn them into digital, editable text that can be understood by your devices. Or convert your PDF to a plain text file containing just the text. Tip: Output both a searchable PDF and the plain text file version. You'll get a searchable PDF document as a result, where the invisible text is overlayed on the original images at the correct locations. Accuracy of the OCR process. To inspect the accuracy of the OCR process.
- Searchable Image - ensures that text is searchable and selectable. This option keeps the original image, deskews it as needed, and places an invisible text layer over it. The selection for 'downsample images' in this same dialog box determines whether the image is downsampled and to what extent.
- Searchable Image (Exact) - ensures that text is searchable and selectable. This option keeps the original image and places an invisible text layer over it. Recommended for cases requiring maximum fidelity to the original image.
- Editable Text & Images - synthesizes a new custom font that closely approximates the original, and preserves the page background using a low-resolution copy.