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.
Whoa. I’ve used AA for years and was not aware of this feature. Thanks for sharing.
Comment by Skip Via — July 18, 2009 @ 9:13 am
[...] Not too long ago Carol mentioned that Acrobat was capable of OCR conversion. I’ve never tried it, but just came across a related step by step for using Acrobat. Carol’s post is here. [...]
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