How to OCR a PDF with Adobe
This guide describes how to use the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) function in Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 (or above) to create searchable and/or editable documents (such as Word docs):
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Academic and Administrative Staff: if the software is not available on your Office PC, please get in touch with your local
IT User Support (Site Office).
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- Open the .PDF file you wish to OCR in Adobe Acrobat Pro
- Click Document > Select OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text Using OCR... menu
- In the Recognize Text window, choose what pages you would like to OCR (single, all, range)
- Click Edit if you want to change other settings like Primary OCR Language (it is suggested to leave all others as per default)
- Click the OK to start: a progress bar will open up until it completes
- Click File > Save As to save file as a PDF with searchable text; or
- Depending on the type of the document (text, table, etc.), in the Save as type field change file format to Microsoft Word Document (*.doc) or any other editable format (Excel, etc.).
Page last updated on 20 August 2017