If you've ever received a document in scanned form, like a paper document that's been scanned into an image-based PDF, or even photos of a document, there's an easier way than trying to manually convert it into editable text. Adobe Acrobat provides the ability to OCR an entire document, which will extract the text from every page of the document and make it fully searchable and editable.
There are some workarounds you can use to make sure that scanned documents are searchable, such as saving them as images (e.g., JPEGs), then scanning them using an online service, and exporting them back into PDF format, but they aren't foolproof. Instead, you'll be able to do all of that within Adobe Acrobat, with much better results.
Adobe Acrobat provides OCR capabilities to any PDF file that was created by scanning a paper document or capturing an image. It will take the PDF, run it through Optical Character Recognition software, and convert each individual page of the document into editable, searchable text.
OCR will automatically generate a custom font for the text, preserving its original appearance while also making it searchable. The result is a PDF that contains searchable, copyable text — eliminating the need to retype, reformat, and rescanning documents, just to have the information available as editable content.
With Acrobat’s Scan & OCR feature
Acrobat comes with a handy tool called “Scan & OCR,” which allows you to convert any document into an editable PDF. If you’ve ever converted a Word document into a PDF, you may know how easily Acrobat converts a scanned PDF document to one that’s fully editable.
To use this feature, open your PDF document in Adobe Acrobat (you can right-click on the file and select “Open With” → “Adobe Acrobat”). If the “Scan & OCR” tool appears in the toolbar, click it. Otherwise, click on the “More Tools” option, and choose “Scan & OCR.”
Clicking “Enhance” opens up a sub-menu, and the first item listed should be “Scanned Document.” Click on it, and you’ll see the “Enhance” button, which is blue. That’s where the real magic happens: Acrobat will scan the document, perform OCR, and convert it into a fully editable PDF. You won’t see anything happening; instead, a small dialogue box will appear in the lower-right corner of the screen, indicating the progress.
After OCR completes, your PDF document will now be fully editable and searchable. This means that you’ll be able to search for specific words within your PDF file. For example, if your document contains a list of people, you’ll be able to look up names within your PDF, just like any other word processing document.
You can save the final PDF as a “smart PDF,” which preserves both the original visual layout of the document and the searchable, copyable text. You can also export it as a DOCX (Word), PPT (PowerPoint), XLS (Excel), or TXT file.
In addition, Acrobat will recognize scans of a document as well, turning them into a searchable PDF. It will recognize the links and make them clickable. For those of you who prefer working with mobile devices rather than a desktop PC, Adobe Acrobat includes an OCR feature that runs on Android phones and tablets, and soon iPad devices.