Improving the text search of previously scanned documents

[James_McCann2@adobeforums.com]

We have a large number of scanned documents - many of them technical drawings, but all containing some text. I now have to search (using the 'find' function) through these documents looking for particular pieces of information.

At the moment, 'find' is failing to find a lot of the information. Is there anything that I can do to a pdf to improve its text recognition?

We are using Acrobat 5.0

Thanks in advance,
James

[mattmatt32@adobeforums.com]

Text recognition is not performed as you search through a document. The OCR
process is carried out at a chosen point, usually when the document is
scanned in, and any recognized text is then saved with the PDF file.

If the results are poor you could attempt to repeat the OCR process on the
PDF and correct any recognition errors before saving the file.

You may have better luck with a dedicated OCR program (Acrobat Capture,
OmniPage, Abbyy FineReader). Acrobat can do OCR if you download the free
Capture plug-in, but it has a 50 page limit.

[Fr._Watson@adobeforums.com]

At the moment, 'find' is failing to find a lot of the information.




If the text is scanned, I am surprised it is finding any information at all, as all that you have are images & not text. If you do Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the PDF's ("Capture" is one OCR program) you will get more info, but be warned that OCR is rarely perfect & you will usually need to 'proofread'.