Using Acrobat for OCR
I was fortunate to participate in the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) at the end of June. As to be expected, the sessions I attended were a mixed bag—some useful and informative, others not so much. The most practical session I attended was a 3-hour lab on Delivering Curriculum and Building Portfolios with Acrobat PDFs. I’m looking forward to more experimentation with Acrobat Portfolios! In the meantime, here’s a quick tip that I learned…
Acrobat Professional comes with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built in! Amazing… and why didn’t I know that before?!
Here’s how it works:
- open a pdf document
- from the Document menu, select OCR text recognition > recognize text using OCR
- choose the page range you want to read and click OK
You get a series of slider bars that indicate activity, and then…nothing. At least, nothing apparent.
- go to File > Export > Word Document
- save the file
Voila! When you open the file using MS Word, you’ll see the OCR results. In the simple test I did, it seemed to work pretty well. Note that you can also export from pdf to a word document without doing optical character recognition, but you only get an image of the page rather than editable text.