As many of you know, in 2008 I posted an Applescript that will use Adobe Acrobat to make PDFs searchable using Acrobat’s OCR capabilities.
In the comments to that post, user nodis pointed out that adding 2 words to one of the lines can make the PDFs quite a bit smaller.
In my testing, I ran a 1.3 MB PDF through the script. Before nodis’ change, the resulting PDF was 1.7 MB. After the change, it was 424K!
Here is the updated script:
To use it:
- Download and uncompress the file and save it to your Desktop, Dock or wherever
- Drag one or more PDFs onto the icon
- Enjoy
Let me know how it works out for you and if you see similar reductions in file size.
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Will this only work with Acrobat 9? If so, is there an equivalent command for Acrobat 8? Thanks.
Hi John, sorry for the late reply. It should work fine for Acrobat 8. That's what I have.
The edited script should work with Acrobat 8 as well — but I don't have a copy installed to test. However, the extreme space savings will probably be seen only with Acrobat 9, which has a superb new OCR flavor as the default: ClearScan.
More about ClearScan here: <http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2009/05/better_pdf...
The revised droplet, plus ClearScan, are what add up to all the space savings with Acro 9.
Is there something comparable for Win 7?
Hi Chiphead, I'm not aware of a scripting language built into Windows 7. However, if what you're looking for is batch OCR'ing in Acrobat, maybe this post will help? http://www.documentsnap.com/use-acrobat-batch-pro...
Many thaks Brooks. I'll take a look. Appreciate your response.
Any chance this works in Acroboat 7 Pro?