Carol Gering » All things Adobe http://rhetorica.uaf.edu/carol Just a place to post random thoughts Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:08:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Using Acrobat for OCR http://rhetorica.uaf.edu/carol/2009/07/17/using-acrobat-for-ocr/ http://rhetorica.uaf.edu/carol/2009/07/17/using-acrobat-for-ocr/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:21:09 +0000 carol http://rhetorica.uaf.edu/carol/?p=82 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:

  1. open a pdf document
  2. from the Document menu, select OCR text recognition > recognize text using OCR
  3. 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.

  1. go to File > Export > Word Document
  2. 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.

]]> http://rhetorica.uaf.edu/carol/2009/07/17/using-acrobat-for-ocr/feed/ 2 InDesign to Flash http://rhetorica.uaf.edu/carol/2008/10/22/indesign-to-flash/ http://rhetorica.uaf.edu/carol/2008/10/22/indesign-to-flash/#comments Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:09:42 +0000 carol http://rhetorica.uaf.edu/carol/?p=50 I have to admit I haven’t yet spent much time looking into the new features of Adobe CS4 products—that’s on my things-to-do list for next month, when I’m planning to attend Adobe Max 2008. As a preview, however, I’m particularly intrigued by the new features that allow InDesign to export working swf files as well as xfl files (ready to import natively into the Flash authoring environment). This clip from Adobe TV gives a demo. It’s about 30 minutes long, and you have to persevere through a bit of cheesiness at the beginning. (The part where he speaks to plush stuffed toys only lasts for seconds…resist the urge to turn it off there! Seriously.) It’s really a fascinating idea, and I’m looking forward to exploring it further.

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