Faced with a long legal agreement which needed to be edited (and with no available digital original) I suddenly remembered that Acrobat 6 Pro was supposed to be able to extract editable text from a scan.
Amazingly, it can. And with perfect accuracy — which is a lot more than you can say for the so-called OCR programs that I have used in the past.
But what is even more astonishing it was able to do this from 9-point condensed type without getting a single word wrong — and it maintained the formatting.
I scanned to a grayscale Tiff at optical resolution and then sampled-down to 400 ppi (which is the most that Acrobat will handle). Then you just go to "Create PDF from File" and Save As to MS Word Document format.
It seems that you can also "Create PDF from Scan" but I am still operating my UMAX from 9.2.2 so I haven’t been able to test that.
Just a useful trick to know, an one which saved a lousy typist like me a great deal of time.
Well, OCR programs can be a huge help, once you get the hang of them and couple them with spelling checkers and other tools. The high-end versions of the CAERE products yield very good results
Ive been using them very intensively and extensively for a couple of decades, sometimes to scan whole books in a number of languages (eight, to be exact).
What you report is very, very encouraging. Ill have to look into Acrobat 6 Pro.
The Adobe online store is temporarily closed right now. Ill have to check the price of any possible upgrades to Acrobat 6 Pro tomorrow. Unless its pretty attractive, Ill pass, since Im happy with the results of my OCR.
BTW, do you know if it works with languages other than English and with scripts other than Roman, specifically Cyrillic?
I am afraid that I don’t know the answer and I don’t have the knowledge of other languages to test it! However there is a free Tryout version if you want to give it a whirl: <http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html>
I am astounded that Adobe could be so short-sighted. Do they want to sell this product or not?!
This is almost as brilliant as their decision to not print a Manual for what is now an extremely powerful program so that most users never discover its capabilities.
Zeb, If someone sets a red Illustrator-made logo to overprint and the layout calls for a black background, you waste a proof or (worse) go to plate or (more worse:) print a million brochures and the customer’s logo doesn’t show.
Thats one feature with which Im not even remotely concerned myself, but I understand how that can be of paramount importance to designers and prepress pros.
Incidentally, did you notice that one set of features is only available in the Windows version of Acrobat 6 Pro?
I’ve never heard of a Windows print shop (there may be in the financial field). I’ve seen a few PCs in shops that have dozens of Macs. I assumed that those shops don’t have Acrobat for the PC, since they most certainly have it for the Mac.
Acrobat doesn’t ask if you were legally entitled to scan a page of type or not; and your scanner mostly doesn’t care either (unless it is one of the newest ones which refuses to scan $50 bills!).
Acrobat just interprets the gray shapes in your scan and turns them back into editable formatted (mostly) text.
What am I doing wrong? I followed Ann’s instructions, did Save As to a Word document, and when I opened the Word document, the scan was there as a picture. I could not select any text.
Did you: Scan and save as a grayscale Tiff (using your Scanner’s optical resolution at 100% size); Open in Photoshop and sample-down to 400 ppi (which is the most that Acrobat will handle); Launch Acrobat Pro and choose File menu/Create PDF from File; Then go to Document Menu/Paper capture; Choose the pages you want and hit the "Edit" button; Choose "Formatted text and graphics"; Let Acrobat complete its work then Save As to MS Word Document format. Open the file in MS Word. ———- Actually, you could have read all of this for yourself in Acrobat’s Help menu/"Converting Scanned pages to Editable Text".
Thanks, Ann There’s a little more to it than "just go to "Create PDF from File" and Save As to MS Word Document format". Since other posters seemed equally surprised, I assumed it was an undocumented trick. Thanks for the info. Murray
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