OCR (optical character recognition) with scan documents stored in pdf format

[ray_mayer@adobeforums.com]

We have converted a substantial number of drawings and documents into pdf format via several methods;

1)large format flatbed scanner (scan to tif then convert to pdf)

2)desktop scanner found on a multifunction printer/copier/scanner (scan to tif then convert to pdf)

3)print to file using the pdf distiller (distill word, excel, autocad, etc) directly to pdf

We found that it would be very useful to "find" or "search" for words and phrases, etc. using a search command like the one in the adobe 6.0 reader.

does adobe provide a product or does a third party add-on exist that would provide this type of capability?

thanks in advance for your support,

ray

[W_T_Allen@adobeforums.com]

Are you looking for something that will perform OCR on your image documents or are you looking for something that will build indexes to allow searching across large sets of your (already OCR-ed) documents?

[Captain]

[email]ray_mayer@adobeforums.com[/email] wrote in message news:<3bb427c6.-1@webx.la2eafNXanI>...

> We have converted a substantial number of drawings and documents into pdf format via several methods;

>
> does adobe provide a product or does a third party add-on exist that would provide this type of capability?
>
> thanks in advance for your support,
>
> ray

Yes, Adobe has Acrobat Capture for this very purpose. Many third
party softwares exist and do a great job. I prefer Finereader. Be
prepared to review and rectify capture suspects/errors. It is
tedious.
Ravi

[ray_mayer@adobeforums.com]

presently our need is to find words in a single open document that has been scanned on a flat bed scanner that did not use any OCR software during the scan process.

[W_T_Allen@adobeforums.com]

Acrobat can do this, but for large numbers of documents or for large-format images you should look into getting Capture.

[ray_mayer@adobeforums.com]

thanks for the response.

am presently looking into capture.

how can i do this with my adobe 5.0 or adobe 6.0 reader?

have tried the search tool which does not work on my scanned document.

any thoughts?

thanks

[Simon_Gill@adobeforums.com]

I think that anything that has been converted to PDF from Word, Excel, etc. using acrobat distiller can be easily searched using the Acrobat Search Function. You could also build an Acrobat Catalog of all your documents and then you would be able to search across all your documents for specific words or phrases. If you plan to create a catalog, may I suggest that you use Acrobat 5. I have found Acrobat 6's Catalog function to be highly inefficient - it tends to create very large index files which far exceed the aggregate size of the cataloged files.

However, for the tif files converted to pdf, you are out of luck since these are just image files and there are no words to search. You could resolve this problem by having the documents OCRed (I use the OmniPage software to do that), or alternatively, you could enter certain key words in the document information page, but those would be the only words you will be able to search for.

[W_T_Allen@adobeforums.com]

Yes, the PDF created from Word docs can already be searched, but the scanned images need to be OCRed, which is why I recommended Capture if there were going to be lots of documents. If it's not many, Acrobat already has a built-in OCR engine.

Ray, you cannot do this with Reader of any version, you need Acrobat or Capture.

[Captain]

[email]ray_mayer@adobeforums.com[/email] wrote in message news:<3bb427c6.1@webx.la2eafNXanI>...

> presently our need is to find words in a single open document that has been scanned on a flat bed scanner that did not use any OCR software during the scan process.

You cannot search for words till you cary out optical character
recognition on the document. If OCR was not carried out at the time
of scan you have to do so now. Hopefully, the scan parameters would
support a good OCR processing.
Ravi