Batch OCR using Acrobat Professional
Have you ever received a PDF file that did not contain searchable text? You may know that you can use Acrobat’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to add an invisible layer of searchable text on top of the file. This allows you to select, copy and search text on a paper document. Great!
What do you do when you have hundreds of TIFFs and Image-only PDFs file that you need to search for a big case? Working with these documents one at a time is not efficient.
If you have Acrobat Professional, you can batch OCR and let you computer do the work for you.
NOTE: Acrobat 9 and up make this process much easier. Simply select Document>OCR Text Recognition>OCR Multiple Files. If you have Acrobat 9 and you just want to OCR a bunch of files, this is probably all you need! Acrobat X can do OCR as part of an Action, so you can combine OCR with other operations as part of a document processing workflow.
Read on to learn how…
Batch Processing to the Rescue
There are two steps to follow:
- Set up a Batch Sequence
- Run a Batch Sequence
Set up a Batch Sequence
Scan your documents locally or send to a PC where Acrobat Pro is installed.
If you have the capability, scan directly to PDF or to an MTIFF (multi-page TIFF). These formats allow all of the pages of a document to be maintained as a single file.
- In Acrobat Professional 7, choose Advanced—>Batch Processing
— or —
In Acrobat Professional 8, choose Advanced—>Document Processing—>Batch Processing - Click the New Sequence button.
- Give the sequence a name.
- Click Select Commands
- Choose Recognize Text Using OCR and click the Add button.
- Double-click the Recognize Text using OCR text (right side of the window) to set OCR Options.
-Set Downsample Images to 300 dpi. Click OK - Click OK again to get back to the main window.
- Click Output Options
- Enable_ PDF Optimizer_ and Do not overwrite existing files.
- Click the Settings Button.
- Click OK.
- Give the revised settings a name such as “B&W Lossy”.
Run a Batch Sequence
Now, all you need to do is to run the batch sequence.
- Place all the files you wish to process in a single folder on your hard drive.
- In Acrobat Professional 7, choose Advanced—>Batch Processing
– or –
In Acrobat Professional 8, choose Advanced—>Document Processing—>Batch Processing - Select the sequence to run
- Click OK
- Select the folder to process
- Click the Select button.
- Select the Output Folder
That’s it!
Sit back and enjoy a cup a coffee as Acrobat does the work for you.