Using OCR with Adobe Acrobat

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used to identify text in scanned images containing printed text. It’s a handy thing to use to enable text can be searched, copied and edited. Adobe Acrobat has an OCR feature built into it. To use you will need a scanned image saved as or converted to a PDF.

In Acrobat X Pro
Open your PDF document then click on ‘Tools’ to show the Tools pane.
From the ‘Recognize Text’ panel select ‘In This File’
The ‘Recognize Text’ window will pop up, click ‘OK’.
Acrobat will go and analyse the document, deskewing and rotating the document as needed.
When completed Acrobat will present the document to you with selectable and searchable text.
You can copy and paste the text as needed or you can use the ‘File’ menu to “Save As…’ a new PDF document or even a Microsoft Word document.

In Acrobat 9 Pro
Open your PDF document then from the ‘Document’ menu go down to ‘OCR Text Recognition’ and select ‘Recognize Text Using OCR’.
The ‘Recognize Text’ window will pop up, click ‘OK’.
Acrobat will go and analyse the document, deskewing and rotating the document as needed.
When completed Acrobat will present the document to you with selectable and searchable text.
You can copy and paste the text as needed or you can use the ‘File’ menu to “Save As…’ a new PDF document or even a Microsoft Word document.

You can use the Multiple files option in both version of Acrobat to select multiple files to batch process. You can even select non-PDF files such as JPG, PNG, TIF, etc.

Recognising text in the original PDF

Rotated document with selectable and searchable text after OCR recognition