Section 75. Convert a Scanned Document into Text

75. Convert a Scanned Document into Text

Before You Begin

74 Set Preferences for Paper Capture

See Also

76 Find OCR Suspects

If you have an existing PDF document that either was scanned without paper capture settings or was created using the From File command, you can still do a search and edit of the PDF by using Acrobat's OCR conversion process.

1.	Select the Source Document From the File menu, select the Open command; then browse to the file you want to convert to searchable text and open it.
2.	Start the Capture From the Documents menu, under the Recognize Text Using OCR submenu, select the Start command. This launches the Recognize Text dialog box. Under the Pages section, you have the option to select the entire document to convert to text, the current page, or a specific page range. Conversion settings are displayed in a text window on the Recognize Text dialog box. If you want to change those setting, click the Edit button. This opens the Recognize Text Settings dialog box. You can then change the Primary OCR Language . You can also change the PDF Output Style to Searchable Image (Exact), Searchable Image (Compact) , or Formatted Text & Graphics and change the Downsample Images to Lowest (600 dpi), Low (300 dpi), Medium (150 dpi) , or High (72 dpi) . Click the OK button to start the paper capturing process.
3.	View the Results Acrobat has now converted the PDF into a searchable document. To search for a word or phrase in this document, select the Search command from the Edit menu. A pane opens on the right side of the document window where you can enter the search text and search options.