Using Adobe Acrobat Pro to Convert Scanned Pages to Copyable Text (OCR)

This guide covers the process of using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing on PDF scans of documents, books, and other physical media to extract text that can be copied and pasted on a computer or other device. Be aware that an Adobe Acrobat Pro license is required to use Adobe OCR to process documents in this way. To request an Acrobat Pro license, please submit a ticket to ITsupport@sau.edu.

There are several methods to using Adobe OCR. The following guide covers the Adobe Acrobat Pro desktop app. For OCR processing on the web, you can visit https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online/ocr-pdf.html 

To begin, you'll first need to have scanned a document into a format that Adobe Acrobat can recognize. At the moment, we recommend using PDF to accomplish this. 

Most scanners on campus are capable of scanning directly to PDF from the printer interface. For questions about scanning physical media to PDF, please contact the IT department at ITsupport@sau.edu.

Once you have the PDF document on your PC, open Acrobat Pro, and from the main menu, select "See all tools":

Then find "Scan and OCR":

You'll be brought to the next menu, where you can choose from one of three options:

1. Select a file: For using OCR on a single document
2. Scan a document: For users with a compatible attached document scanner
3. Or recognize text in multiple files: For multiple files (batch OCR conversion)

After selecting your preferred conversion method, you'll be brought to your PDF with a number of options for conversion on the left. For single files, choose "In this file", then select the required pages, then click "Recognize text":

Depending on the file(s) size, the conversion process may take some time. After it has completed, your document should be reoriented (if not already in the correct orientation) with text that can be highlighted, copied, and pasted elsewhere. Be aware that the document needs to be saved in order to apply these changes to the file itself.

Additional resources on OCR:

Using OCR to extract text from images via Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/use-ocr-to-read-text-from-image.html

What is OCR? Via Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/guides/what-is-ocr.html 

Turn handwritten text into a PDF via Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/use-ocr-to-turn-handwritten-text-into-pdf-files.html