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Batch OCR using Adobe Acrobat Professional
March 2006
Have you ever received a PDF file that did not contain searchable text? You may know that you can use Acrobat’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to add an invisible layer of searchable text on top of the file. This allows you to select, copy and search text on a paper document. Great!
What do you do when you have hundreds of TIFFs and Image-only PDFs file that you need to search for a big case? Working with these documents one at a time is not efficient.
If you have Acrobat Professional, you can batch OCR and let you computer do the work for you.
Batch Processing to the Rescue
There are two steps to follow:
- Set up a Batch Sequence
- Run a Batch Sequence
Set up a Batch Sequence
Scan your documents locally or send to a PC where Acrobat Pro is installed.
If you have the capability, scan directly to PDF or to an MTIFF (multi-page TIFF). These formats allow all of the pages of a document to be maintained as a single file.
In Acrobat Professional, choose Advanced Batch Processing
Click the New Sequence button.
Give the sequence a name.
Click Select Commands
Choose Recognize Text Using OCR and click the Add button.
Double-click the Recognize Text using OCR text (right side of the window) to set OCR Options.
Set Downsample Images to 300 dpi. Click OK
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Click OK again to get back to the main window.
Click Output Options.
Note: Output options allows you specify where the OCR’d files should be written. I suggest writing them to a local drive and copying later to a network store.
Enable PDF Optimizer and Do not overwrite existing files.
Click the Settings Button.
Adjust the settings to make the smallest possible files, especially for Black and White (monochrome) files:
- JBIG2 Lossless is very efficient and preserves the exact appearance of the text.
- Consider trying JBIG2 Lossy which causes some visual degradation, but can be up to 70% smaller than JBIG2 Lossless.
Click OK. Give the revised settings a name such as “B&W Lossy”.
Run a Batch Sequence
Now, all you need to do is to run the batch sequence.
- Place all the files you wish to process in a single folders on your hard drive.
- Choose Advanced à Batch Processing
- Select the sequence to run
- Click OK
- Select the folder to process
- Click the Select button.
- Select the Output Folder
That’s it! Sit back and enjoy a cup a coffee as Acrobat does the work for you.
Want to know more about Adobe Acrobat for the legal profession?
Legal Landing page on Adobe.com
Rick Borstein is Adobe's Business Development Manager for the Legal Market. He has over 18 years experience in the software industry and is an Adobe Certified Expert for Acrobat.