asked on

Searchable Adobe PDF Documents

Hey guys,

We received about 50 PDF documents and we want to search for text within these documents. I tried doing a search but nothing comes up. These look like scanned PDF's, how can i search for text on all of the documents?

Joe Howard

If the pdf's are scanned then you can't search in them without ocr'ing them. They are no more than an image which obviously can't be content searched.

You can Google "PDF OCR" for free or paid solutions, the quality of different ocr products greatly differs.

Joe Winograd

If you have Adobe Acrobat (not Adobe Reader), then you already have OCR. Acrobat calls it Recognize Text in Version X (10) and Text Recognition in Version XI (11). You'll find it in the Tools section. Here's what it looks like in Acrobat XI Pro:

If you don't have Acrobat, I recommend the excellent (and free!) PDF-XChange Editor:
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor

They also have a PRO (non-free) version, but I think you'll find that the free version does everything you need — including OCR! Regards, Joe

Bill H

ASKER

Would this not work?

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-acrobat-x/recognizing-text-in-scanned-pdf-documents/

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Joe Winograd

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

Joe Winograd

Our messages just crossed. Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about in my first post <http:#a40291063> — Adobe Acrobat's Text Recognition. I showed the screenshot from Acrobat XI Professional in that one. Here's the Recognize Text screen from Acrobat X Standard:

Regards, Joe