Adobe Acrobat OCR – Tutorial

In the digital humanities, it’s frequently necessary to take scans of physical materials, like books, and process them so that the information within can be manipulated on a computer. A technology called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) makes this processing possible. It recognizes text in a document (usually some kind of image or uneditable PDF) and makes it editable and searchable. Although there are many ways to run OCR on a PDF (the most common file format that a scan may be in), this tutorial will walk you through the process with Adobe Acrobat.

Step 1: Get Acrobat

This may seem pretty straightforward, but since Acrobat is a premium application, you’ll need to make sure you have access to the full version to run OCR. If you’re a Carleton student, you can get access to Adobe Creative Cloud and its suite of apps, including Acrobat, by emailing the ITS Helpdesk. You’ll need to provide a legitimate reason for needing the software (e.g. for a class, a club, or some kind of academic project).

Step 2: Open Your PDF in Acrobat

Once you’ve downloaded and opened Acrobat, go to File > Open in the top bar and select your PDF.

Step 2.5 (If Needed): Enable Editing

It’s possible that when you open your PDF, a blue bar will appear at the top of the screen that says: “This file claims compliance with the PDF/A standard and has been opened read-only to prevent modification.” Click the button that says “Enable Editing” and click “OK” on the next dialogue box.

Step 3: Organize Pages

If your scan is in any way messy (e.g. flipped pages, pages out of order, scan area way too big, etc.), this is a good time to clean it up. It helps the OCR as well if your pages are in the correct orientation before beginning. Go to the menu on the left that says “All tools” and click on “Organize pages.” In this menu, you can select any pages you need to reorder or flip. While you’re there, you can click on “Set page boxes” if you need to do any cropping. If you do, be sure to check that your page range (bottom left of menu) is what you want it to be! By default, it’s just one page, but there’s an option to set it to “All.”

Step 4: OCR

The time has come! Now that your document is ready, click on the option under “All tools” that says “Scan & OCR.” It will take you to another menu. Here, under the “Recognize Text” subheading, click on “In this file.” By default, it’s set to recognize text in English from all pages. If that works for you, click on “Recognize text.”

Step 5: Save and Download

Make sure to save the fruits of your labor! On the top bar, go to File > Save as… and select the folder you’d like to save your document to. (If Acrobat wants you to reduce your file size, it’s OK to do so.) Rename it if desired, and…

That’s It!

For more information on how Adobe Acrobat runs OCR on images and PDFs, check out their documentation.

For the next step after finishing this tutorial, read this guide on how to extract the text from an OCR’d PDF into a plain or rich text document using Automator (MacOS only).

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask!