Use Acrobat Batch Processing To OCR Your PDFs Easily

May 5, 2009

As you may know, when I want to OCR a bunch of PDFs at once as part of my scanning workflow, I use an Applescript droplet to have Adobe Acrobat OCR the files.

The other day I came across this blog post from Jonathan Bowman over at Adobe. He shows how to use a feature of Acrobat that I didn’t notice before: Batch Processing.

He has screenshots showing how it works, but I thought I would put together this video that shows how I set it up.


The nice thing about it is the process is pretty much the same whether you use Mac or PC.

By the way, there are a ton of things you can use Batch Processing for, not just making PDFs searchable. I will definitely be poking around in there.

Do you use Acrobat Batch Processing for anything?

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Related posts:

  1. Doing OCR Batch Processing Using The ScanSnap And ABBYY FineReader
  2. Updated: Acrobat Applescript for ScanSnap OCR
  3. Abbyy Finereader and Adobe Acrobat – Why Does Fujitsu Include Both?
  4. Making Acrobat OCR’ed PDFs Smaller With Formatted Text & Graphics
  5. How To Create Searchable PDFs With The ScanSnap S300M

Posted by Brooks | Filed Under Processing, Software 

Comments

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7 Responses to “Use Acrobat Batch Processing To OCR Your PDFs Easily”

  1. FrankR on May 25th, 2009 2:28 pm

    Thanks for this video, it helped a lot!

    I set this up and OCR'ed a number of files, and was surprised at the file size increase. As an example, the first file went from 464k to 2.6m (almost 6x increase). Does this sound about right?

    If so, do you OCR everything? Any optimization tips? I was reading about Adobe's new ClearScan tech. available in Acrobat 9 which supposedly solves this issue.

  2. BrooksD on May 27th, 2009 12:08 am

    Hi FrankR, that sounds about right to me unfortunately. I personally haven't looked into the file size issue too much as I figure hard drive space is relatively cheap (plus I am lazy).

    That ClearScan does look interesting though! Maybe I'll try to get my hands on Acrobat 9 and play around with it.

    I personally OCR almost everything unless its something I absolutely positively know I will never need to search for.

    Anyone else have any PDF optimization tips?

  3. Mike on May 27th, 2009 6:48 am

    i have just tested a 92k file on 3 apps
    acrobat 888k
    readiris 733k
    pdfpen 116k
    can someone make a batch script for pdfpen please
    thanks

  4. BrooksD on May 27th, 2009 12:20 pm

    @Mike:

    Check out this post from MacSparky. It might help? http://www.macsparky.com/2009/05/23/pdfpen-ocr-fo... />

    Also, thissupport pagefrom PDFPen implies that support has a collection of scripts, so they may be able to help you out.

    Let us know if either of those works out for you.

  5. Sarah on August 3rd, 2009 4:35 pm

    How does this compare to using Abbyfine reader? I never installed he acrobat because it seemed rather clunky and always popped up with error messages and other annoyances.

  6. esther on November 24th, 2009 7:40 pm

    Thanks so much for this tutorial! It was exactly what I needed. I just wish there had been a transcript or other text instructions, because watching the video took forever =T

  7. BrooksD on November 24th, 2009 8:04 pm

    Hi esther, thanks a lot for the feedback. I'll try to do both in the future!

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