Comments on: Making Acrobat OCR’ed PDFs Smaller With Formatted Text & Graphics

By: BrooksD

BrooksD — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:20:05 +0000

Thanks for the tip, nodis!

By: nodis

nodis — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:16:27 +0000

Thus is a great tip, but somewhat out of date. Acrobat 9 has a new technology for OCRd PDFs called ClearScan, that results in dramatically smaller file sizes and crisper PDFs. More about it here http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2009/05/better_pdf... (In case that link isn't visible, just Google 'acrobat clearscan ocr' and see the post in the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog.

By: BrooksD

BrooksD — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:54:23 +0000

Thanks for that Rob. I have been meaning to point to that PDFPen script for a while but haven't had a chance. This reminded me.

By: Rob

Rob — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:51:44 +0000

Use one of the Applescripts available here and do the OCR with Acrobat or PDF Pen. I think it was MacSparky that recently had scripts for PDF Pen.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:30:39 +0000

@brooksd
I have unsearchable PDFs from the scansnap AND the searchable ones in devonthink bc I had devonthink do the OCR. I now want to run OCR on the unsearchable ones not in dt. Does that make sense?

By: BrooksD

BrooksD — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:00:44 +0000

@Sarah Do you mean you have PDFs that are currently searchable in Devonthink, but you want to take them out of Devonthink but still have them searchable?

By: Sarah

Sarah — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:22:34 +0000

I have a zillion scanned PDFS from my scansnap but I haven't run OCR on them yet. I have been having Devonthink do that, but now I am thinking that having all of my PDFs OCRd would be helpful. ABbyfinereader seems to make a mess of the PDFs, taking forever and making a super long file name out of them (in addition to keeping the original PDF which I no longer want). How do you all handle this? Help?

By: pendolino

pendolino — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:47:33 +0000

@brooksd – i just discovered the same with 7.0 moments before getting your response. thanks. looks like it sticks.

By: BrooksD

BrooksD — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:37:04 +0000

@pendolino – In the version of Acrobat that I have, 8.0 Mac, it remembers which OCR setting you used last time, so you don't have to go in and set it every time. So if 7.0 doesn't do that, then you may need to wait for 8.0?

By: pendolino

pendolino — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:16:49 +0000

@brooks – thanks for this tip. i just used it on a one page typed letter i received and the difference was going from 740 to 40 KB. that pretty much is in line with what you got but i have an interesting mysterious problem with adobe standard 7.0 after OCRing where it just crashes a few seconds after the process is complete. i have to save the doc fast or else the OCR wont be saved. has anyone seen this before?

is there a way to set this behavior in Adobe as default for OCR scans? its a bit anyone having to dig down into the options every time.