Tweak your OCR settingsĪfter a brief pause indicated by a progress bar on the bottom of the window, your text will be fully recognized. button to select your OCR language, pick your PDF output style, and the resolution you want Acrobat to use while recognizing your text. If you're recognizing a document that's in your computer's default languages (English (US) in my case), simply click OK to get your text recognized. You'll now get some options to tweak your OCR. In that sidebar, select the Recognize Text tab, then click the In This File button. All you have to do is open the scanned document or image that you'd like to OCR, then click the blue Tools button in the top right of the toolbar. Open your image or PDF and get Acrobat started recognizing your textĪcrobat can recognize text in any PDF or image file in dozens of languages. If that's all you have, jump to the end of this tutorial for some other great OCR tools you can use. The latter is a free app just for viewing PDFs.

Note: this tutorial requires Adobe Acrobat, not Adobe Reader. If so, it's a great tool to OCR your documents quickly on a Mac or PC. It's commonly used in business, and is bundled with Adobe Creative Suite and the full version of Creative Cloud, so there's a good chance your business computer already has it installed-or you can install it for free from your Creative Cloud subscription. OCR a Document or Image in AcrobatĪdobe Acrobat is the original standard program for creating, editing, and viewing PDF files.

Here's how you can use the OCR tool built-into Adobe Acrobat to turn your scanned documents and pictures of text into real digital text.

It uses your computer's smarts to recognize letter shapes in an image or scanned document, and turn them into digital text you can copy and edit as needed. That's what OCR- Optical Character Recognition-does. Or, you could let your computer do the heavy lifting for you, by turning your image into text and letting you search through your scanned documents as easily as you search through any other documents. By default, they're little more than a picture of your document-and if you want to find info inside them, you'll have to open each one and read it for yourself. What's not so great is finding content stored away inside one of your hundreds of scanned documents. They let you archive stacks of paper into folders on your computer, taking up far less space and being infinitely easier to organize, move, and copy.

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