Acrobat 9 OCR and "OCR Suspects"

I downloaded the trial for version 9.
Took a poorly scanned page and OCR'd it.
It (expectedly) had a few errors.
Then I selected "OCR Suspects" from menus.
What it should have done is found the "low confidence" results, but
instead, it said no OCR suspects were found.
This used to work in version 8, but I can't get 'OCR suspects' working in V9 trial.
Can anyone confirm if this works in the full version of Acrobat 9 Pro or Standard?

It's strange that while I posted to this Adobe forum, there is a response over at objectmix.com. As contributing to this topic from 2 locations seems confusing, I'll carry on here.
Amannagpal76 responded, saying in part that ClearScan in 9 Pro replaces Formatted Text & Graphics. Good to know this. ClearScan does, however, continue the mix. If ocr doesn't work on a character graphic, that graphic will continue to be displayed as such, amidst ClearScan's synthesized type 3 font imitation of the original font. This is most obvious when using the marquee zoom tool.
Aman suggests using the Touchup Text Tool and changing the font to any font installed on one's system. This doesn't work for ClearScan. Selecting a different font in Touchup for a PDF that came via a wordprocessor works fine, but not for a PDF that came via a scan. That, unfortunately, is the only time that ClearScan is used. The error message when I try this states that there's no system font to match the one in ClearScan, and text can't be added or deleted.
ClearScan is remarkable for the small size file it produces. That size can be reduced considerably even further by converting it to the Adobe 7 file format. ClearScan's synthesized font is also remarkable when enlarging the page on screen. Then you can see its true outlines -- rather chewed up in high magnification, but that's OK. It would be nice to extract the font in question and use it on one's system. One downside to ClearScan is that its ocr fails to retain italics when output to RTF and Word.
I have never found a suspect in 9 Pro.
The conclusion from the above is that the hidden text produced by any ocr'ing in 9 Pro can't be corrected.

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Acrobat 9 OCR issues

I am trying to make several hundred pages worth of PDF documents searchable. I have tried everything I can think of with the OCR recognition, and cannot figure out a way to display and edit OCR suspects. No matter which format I try and perform OCR recognition in (Searchable Image, Searchable Image (Exact), or ClearScan), I am told there are no OCR suspects. However, when I copy and paste the text to a Word document, there are obviously errors. From what I understand, Find OCR Suspects is only supposed to work with ClearScan, but it doesn't. In addition, it seems that even if it did work, trying to correct the errors using the TouchUp Text tool won't work anyway, because the program converts everything to custom fonts, and it wants a system font available in order to edit. I cannot figure out how to convert this text to a system font to make edits.
To sum up, here are my issues:
1. Why are OCR suspects not displayed when OCR recognition is performed?
2. How is it possible to fix errors in ClearScan if a system font is required?
3. How does one convert the ClearScan document to a system font so edits can be made?
4. What is the point of performing OCR on a document if one cannot go in and fix errors so the file can be searched and indexed properly? As I said, I have hundreds of pages of scanned documents that need to be made searchable.
Thank you for your help.

Hi,
When using Searchable Image (Exact) or Searchable Image there will be no "suspects".
"Suspects" is not a functionality associated with either; rather it is exclusive to
Formatted Text & Graphics (Acrobat 8 & earlier) or ClearScan (Acrobat 9).
Keep in mind that use of OCR (from any software house) does not assure 100% rendering
let alone 100% fidelity of whatever is rendered.
If that is needed then it is time to open the authoring application and created an authoring file
that holds the content. Output this to native PDF.
When Formatted Text & Graphics or ClearScan is used if there are characters that are not recognized
then these are left as raster images. These will not "copy-paste" to a text editor anymore that a jpeg would.
A number of variables dictate/control how successful any OCR is. Some are -
--| effective resolution of (both horizontally and vertically) - impacts fidelity and accuracy
--| quality of source paper (a simple fold line of otherwise "good" paper can leave a wide band void of OCR output)
--| scanner software
--| scanner lamp (quality/intensity)
--| scanner cleanliness/maintenance
On to the "point" of OCR --
Actually, it is *not* to provide a simple, low resource demand, mechanism to development of digital content that can under go
editing-formatting-layout changes. Never has been.
OCR/ICR, etc. primary functionality has been/is to provide a find/search capability.
OCR/ICR has little to no understanding of layout, format, word - line - paragraph structure, etc.
If one needs "proper" digital content (spelling, punctuation, syntax, layout, format, etc.) then one
must master the content into authoring files using the appropriate word processor or page layout application.
Typically, even older source paper can provide good images from scan provided an adequate scanner is used.
Once in PDF OCR (searchable image (exact)) provides high fidelity/accuracy.
From this, catalog indices may be developed.
In conjunction with PDFs having useful metadata the use of Search across one or several "mounted" Catalog index/indices
provides accurate results.
Changing ClearScan font.
Content selected, you need to get into the Properties dialog of the TouchUp Text Tool.
There, go to the Text tab. Adjust settings to pull from available fonts on local machine.
Expect to to this one PDF page at a time.
Be well...

Please provide facility to correct Acrobat's OCR errors

When Acrobat 8 OCRs a document, it makes a fair number of errors - which I could live with if one could correct the errors afterwards.
"Find OCR Suspect" doesn't find anything because Acrobat "thinks" it has made no errors - but it always does make some; all OCR programs do, but all others do allow one to correct the errors afterwards.
Although it is possible to use the touch-up tool to correct the errors, it is extremely difficult to do so because one can't see the text behind the image that one is touching up.
Given that Acrobat OCR has now existed since v4, it's extraordinary that Adobe still hasn't got round to fixing this problem, four full versions later. It wouldn't be at all difficult for them to fix this, by providing a "touch up OCR results" mode via a menu, that displays the text that is under the image.
The reason I and many other people still use Acrobat's OCR is that no "proper OCR program" that I know of preserves the layout perfectly (without a great deal of time-consuming post-OCR fiddling about in a word-processor, and even then not if you don't have the required fonts installed or if the required fonts' licence is non-embeddable). Please could you add the above simple feature, which would turn a currently very clunky OCR feature into an extremely powerful one?
Dave

I bought InFix but it does not really solve the problem: Yes, InFix shows the hidden text and it can be edited and sent back to being hidden. The problem is that there seems no way to make the original image invisible during the editing. Since the two (image text and hidden text) overlap precisely, one needs to shift the hidden text to somewhere else for viewing and editing and shift it back afterwards, so the whole process becomes too tedious for any serious work.

Is it possible to correct Acrobat's OCR errors?

When Acrobat 8 OCRs a document, it makes a fair number of errors - which I could live with if one could correct the errors afterwards, but I can't see any way to do that - is it possible to?
"Find OCR Suspect" doesn't find anything because Acrobat "thinks" it has made no errors - but it always does make some; all OCR programs do, but all others do allow one to correct the errors afterwards.
Dave

Thanks for this-- I was really banging my head against a wall on a large set of data we needed to OCR and verify.
It took me a while to find the "fill" for the text. It will show up as a red question mark on the dialog box when you are doing this process.
I like the way that you get to see the scanned text immediately when you change the color, then when you click on the text you see the ocr version. Very helpful. Thank you.

Can't change OCR Suspects

I'm running Adobe Acrobat Proffessional 8.1.7 on WinXP and doing a lot of OCR Text Recognition on a bounch of pdf's from random scanners and software.
When I run "Find All OCR Suspects" some of the suspects are greyed out - for some strange reason. And that's even though it's undoubtly text! See pic.
This is very confussing! Can anyone please help - I really need to get my work done!

Hi Lars,
When Acrobat's OCR comes across parts of the image that it is not sure of ("suspects") it leaves behind a bit-map image.
Ideally, there is enough "substance" there for us to correct these suspects.
But, as you note, sometimes the "suspect" field is greyed out.
When I've encountered these, they are typically associated with image content that is of a noticeably lower effective resolution
(lighter in "line weight", as it were) and, sometimes, of poor clarity or contrast with the white background.
My take on it is that there's just not enough "substance" there for the software to glom onto.
Often, it appears to be more of an issue with the quality of the source paper
(most times - sometimes, the scanner needs cleaning/calibration) than with Acrobat.
Be well...

Is Arabic language supported in Acrobat XI OCR option?

Hi,
I'm Planing to buy Adobe Acrobat XI Pro, please let me know the followings:-
1- Is Arabic language supported in Acrobat XI OCR option?
2- Do you have authorized re-seller in Qatar? if yes, please give me their contact details.
Appreciate your earliest response.
Thanks,
Nabeel Ansari

Hi Nabeel
I am afraid Arabic language is not supported in Acrobat XI OCR. For more on OCR, please refer to http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/acrobat_ocr_make_your_scanned/
Please visit Find an Adobe reseller for your second query.

Acrobat Pro XI and ScanSnap iX500

I use a ScanSnap iX500 on Mac running OS !0.10.2. The ScanSnap uses an ABBYY built-in ocr engine and it generates an excellent ocr layer. I can see the OCR layer in other apps and I know it is excellent. And other apps that handle pdfs (PDFpenPro and Skim) can word search the layer perfectly. Recently, however, Acrobat Pro XI cannot word search files scanned and ocr'd by the ScanSnap, even though the layer is complete and excellent. Does anyone know what is going on or how to fix this? I have re-installed Acrobat Pro XI and the ScanSnap software (including the ABBYY part) from scratch, and all software is fully updated. This is occurring on two Macs; it is not confined to one machine.

I'm having the exact same problem with both my Macbook Pro and my iMac 5k Retina. I was ready to return my ScanSnap iX500 thinking the OCR was broken but it's Acrobat that has the problem. My ScanSnap iX500 scans the document and I have the OCR setup correctly but both Adobe Acrobat Pro XI and the Adobe Reader barely pick up any of the OCR text in the document. Pure text documents seem to be OCR readable with Adobe Acrobat Pro XI but keyword searching bills or bank statements or anything that the text is broken up into sections seems to be useless as most of the words don't show and are not searchable.
I can see the that the documents are properly OCR searchable as Mac Yosemite will index all the keywords so I can find the document in finder but acrobat can't search them. I can also keyword search properly the documents using Macs built in Preview app.
I've also tried OCR indexing the documents using the ScanSnap iX500's built in hardware, ABBYY Finereader express, Scansnap receipt, Searchable PDF converter but Acrobat won't properly keyword search any of them.
The only solution I've found is to scan the documents with or without OCR then open Adobe Acrobat Pro XI and rescan the OCR again. You can do this on one document or a Batch of documents so you could fix all your PDF's overnight. After that then Adobe Acrobat Pro XI and Adobe Reader can OCR search the documents properly.
Here's the solution I'm using until Adobe fixes Acrobat on the Mac. Just have Acrobat rescan the OCR and save the file to fix is. Instructions below:
http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/products/acrobat/pdfs/adobe-acrobat-xi-scan-pape r-to-pdf-and-apply-ocr-tutoria…
Scan paper to PDF and apply OCR with Adobe® Acrobat® XI
Scan and convert paper documents and forms to PDF. Make scanned text searchable automatically with optical character recognition (OCR), and then check and fix suspected errors.
Scan to PDF
Apply OCR to a scanned PDF document
Open the PDF file.
2. In Acrobat select View>Tools>TextRecognition. TheText Recognition panel in the Tools pane opens.
3. Click In This File. Designate the desired pages and click OK. Acrobat applies OCR to the scanned document.

Acrobat Reader v8 and vXI side-by-side installation

Hi,
A while back I bought a Fujitsu scanner which came with Acrobat Reader Standard ver.8. It has worked brilliantly over the years. The whole package - quality!
Now Acrobat Reader has obviously evolved and we are now up to version XI and occasionaly a pdf arrives that acrobat complains about. I suspect pdf was created in a newer version with features my old v8 can't handle. Now, I'd like to be able to read these docs, so the question is whether I can have these two products installed on the same PC? Can I download the free XI reader while keeping the old Version 8 Standard?
I don't want to pay £194 for an upgrade. That would be a complete waste of money as I see it.
Thanks for any comments.

Just to get your product names right - Adobe Acrobat Standard was the retail product, Adobe Reader is the free one. "Acrobat Reader" doesn't exist.
Yes, you can install Reader and Acrobat at the same time; but you'll need to define which is the default hander when double-clicking PDF files (unless you change it, Reader will take over as it's the last thing to be installed).
Acrobat 8 is now end-of-life so there won't be any more free updates, and if you upgrade something else (move to Windows 8, etc.) you will have to buy a newer version anyway. It depends on what you're using it for, but the OCR and editing/exporting features in Acrobat XI are far better than they were in Acrobat 8.

I have opened scanned pages in to acrobat X1 pro and cannot edit, it says its not editable text how do I scan it as an editable text

I have opened scanned pages in to acrobat X1 pro and cannot edit, it says its not editable text how do I scan it as an editable text

All scanners output one thing only -- an image, a picture of the stuff on the paper that was scanned.
There is not "text". There is a picture of text characters.
This image / picture can be brought into a PDF. What is in the PDF is still an image / picture of text.
Open the PDF with Acrobat. Use Acrobat's OCR feature.
If you desire to touchup some characters use the "ClearScan" OCR.
(Review Acrobat's Help to resolve any questions on this.)
Note that PDF is not a word processor file format and does not tolerate word processor like "editing".
Use Acrobat to do touchups to characters and short character strings. Save As often.
Be well...

Adobe Acrobat 5.0 and Windows 7 Problem

How do I get Adobe Acrobat 5.0 and Windows 7 compatible so I can access my attachments to e-mails sent to me?

I was successful in installing AA5 in Win7 Starter as a test. It works except that I changed the printer port to file (AcroTray or the Distiller Assistant of AA5 does not work in Win7). You can open the files that are created in Distiller to create PDFs. You may be able to use watched folders to automate the process to some degree.
I suspect that your question is more of having problems reading PDF files in AA5. That is a different issue. It is not a Win7 compatibility issue, but one of needing a newer PDF viewer. I have AA5 on one XP machine that I use Reader X on for seeing the newer files. I do have to deal with some conflicts between AA5 and ARX, but I can deal with that (many folks lose there minds on that).
There is one other option that might be a major problem. Many folks are getting Win7 on 64-bit machines. In that case, you will have to be sure AA5 runs in 32-bit compatibility.
At least that should give you some ideas of what might work. If a 64-bit machine, you may definitely have a problem -- I never tested that combination.

Problems with print to pdf with Acrobat Pro 9 and FireFox 8

***The page I am using for my base is: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/2010/12/google-ebooks.html
***I have Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and FireFox 8 installed.
The problem with FireFox is when I select a part of a web page and try to print that selected text the first line gets chopped, if the text is small the first line might even be missing completely. Perhaps it is a margin issue but not sure how to modify this.
I know I am not being very clear but if anybody has any ideas or would like further info please let me know.
Thank you.

I suspect if you do the same process with a print to paper, you will get the same result. I got the same result with SeaMonkey, but IE8 printed the full font to a PDF. That would suggest it is not Acrobat, but the browser. As I said, suggests, so be careful about drawing your conclusions.

I've uploaded Acrobat XI Pro and it freezes when I'm using it. I uninstalled and re-installed. When I login, it says that it is unable to validate the account and has an option to use the trial. How do I fix this?

I've uploaded Acrobat XI Pro and it freezes when I'm using it. I uninstalled and re-installed. When I login, it says that it is unable to validate the account and has an option to use the trial. How do I fix this?

This is an open forum, not Adobe support... you need Adobe staff support to help
Adobe contact information - http://helpx.adobe.com/contact.html
-Select your product and what you need help with
-Click on the blue box "Still need help? Contact us"

I am working in Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and just created a pdf form from a MS Word document. I need to find out how to have a date field in my form which will update automatically. Can some one out there help me?

I am working in Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and just created a pdf form from a MS Word document. I need to find out how to have a date field in my form which will update automatically.

Update automatically under which circumstances, exactly?

How do I upload Adobe Reader 9, Adobe Acrobat XI Pro, and other tools with the Pro onto my new computer?

     Since I am already a customer of Adobe, I need to know how to upload Adobe Reader 9, Adobe Acrobat XI Pro, and the other tools that go with both programs onto my new Windows 7 HP computer without having to fill out a new customer form or without having to pay for another Adobe membership as a new member? I need to know what to do step-by-step so that I can upload my Adobe reader 9, Adobe Acrobat XI Pro, and the other tools for the Reader and the Acrobat XI Pro.
     You may send the step-by-step instructions to my e-mail address of [email address removed by host].
     Thank you!
Dean W. Ballew

I have been trying to start my subscription again for my Acrobat XI Pro and for the annual subscription of the PDF Export for Word and Excel. The PDF Export expired according to my subscription list, but, I think that I had cancelled my Acrobat XI Pro of $ 29.99 monthly, so, I am wanting to presubscribe for it again, but, when I try to put my Code in for my Debit Card, it will not register with your company.
So, I do not know what to do to get it back again with my monthly and annually subscription payments for PDF Export and for Acrobat XI Pro. I have already downloaded the Adobe Reader XI onto my computer so I am set for that product. I just do not know what to do about the PDF Export and the Acrobat XI Pro to be able to get them started once again.
Dean W. Ballew

I have two issues. 1) unable to update Acrobat XI Pro and 2) unable to register product

First issue: I have for the second time installed Acrobat xi pro and then click on "check for updates" from the help menu. And it shows that an update is available. But when I update it I am given the following error message:
Error 1328. Error applying patch to file C:\Config.Msi\PT669B.tmp. It has probably been updated by other means, and can no longer be modified by this patch. For more information contact your patch vendor."
When I click on "details" I am sent to adobe's "update error" page. Which states the following for error 1328: Error applying patch to [filename]. It's likely that something else updated the file, and the patch can't modify it. For more information, contact your patch vendor.
I have tried uninstalling program and re-installing program but still get same error message from my attempt at updating. So I am not sure if program is update or not. And I do not know who my "patch vendor" is.
Second issue: Unable to register product with Adobe. Because the option to do so from the "help" menu which lists "product registration" is greyed/dimmed out. Therefore not giving me the ability to register this product. Please let me know what is causing this problem.

I am not sure, but will suggest some things to try. On the activate issue, it may be that your system already thinks it is activated and so you might try the deactivate and check. If that works, I would suggest you then uninstall, run http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/acrobatcleaner.html, remove anything left of the Acrobat folder, reboot, and reinstall. Hopefully you can open Acrobat and activate. Then do the updates from the Help menu.

Acrobat 9 OCR and "OCR Suspects"

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