Simple and reliable method to preform an OCR on a pdf? [SOLVED]

Question

I have Acrobat at work which does a wonderful job preforming an OCR (optical character recognition) on scanned pdf files so that one can do keyword searching within the pdf.  I have spent the past hour following-up various guides on the 'net at large which do not work for me.  Can someone recommend a simple and reliable method to accomplish this?
Last edited by graysky (2014-03-30 13:50:34)

Answer 1

I can second OCRFeeder. It can use different OCR engines, and the application doesn't hide the complexity of the options that these engines accept, so with a little fine tuning you should get reasonable results. For Latin text, that is. For non-Latin or mixed scripts, all  FOSS engines are essentially useless (I've tried long and hard to get Japanese OCR to work).
To be honest, I myself only use Acrobat now because it's the only thing that produces consistently excellent results. For example, text selection will often not work smoothly  because the FOSS tools don't group the text objects properly into lines or paragraphs.