The professor says she is "working in Adobe Acrobat Pro" to create these scanned documents.
Can you (or anyone) advise me what to tell her to make them documents we can highlight? Whadya do, just take the scanned document that has a .pdf extension and change it to a .pdf that Adobe can read?
Obvioiusly I've never been involved with this before so thank you for your patience.
She can use what's called Optical Character Recognition in Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert the image in to live text. It depends on what version she has as to how it's done.
In version 9 she would use Document>OCR text recognition.
In version X she would open the scanned PDF and use the "tools" pallet>Recognize text.
I had used the "Convert page to Adobe PDF..." plugin for Firefox to get this recipe. Like the OP, I could not highlight any text for highlighting or anything else. Use the Tolls menu, Text Recognition, "In this file". Allow to finish. Now you will be able to select text for highlighting, copy, paste, anything you want. Don't forget to save the pdf file after doing this or your changed will be lost.
I have the same problem. I get pdf files from my college courses I would like to mark up with the highlight pen using Adobe Reader X. Even when the pen appears on the tool box at the top of the page, it still doesn't work. I click on the highlight tool, then click-and-drag across text in the pdf document, or I select text first and then click on the highlight tool...and NOTHING. On some pdf's selecting text will draw a line across the page that turns into a box if I also drag the cursor down the page. Yet on other pdf documents, the highlight tool works as advertised. I check the security settings: Security method = no security, commenting = allowed. Very frustrating. Have spent hours trying to diagnose the problem. Could it be that the professor is using software other than Adobe to create the pdf that Reader X won't recognize, or is there something else going on here?
Thank you again for your 10.24 post. I tried your suggestions today. The university computer lab i use has Adobe Acrobat Pro 6. The OCR function is under the dropdown menu "Documents>>Paper Capture". This permits conversion a scanned page to searchable text. Before beginning it asks you to select 1 of 2 Settings defined as: "Primary OCR Language English", or "PDF Output Style: Searchable Image (Exact)". That is the only choice to be made before conversion begins. After the conversion you can review and correct suspect words on captured pages. I tried both choices and regardless of which ended up with a document that was searchable, but still would not permit highlighting (I selected text with the highlight tool, clicked and dragged over a captured page, and nothing happened, same result as my earlier post). If I search for a particular word, all occurrences become shade-highlighted but if I expressly attempt to highlight a word with the highlighter it won't do it.
Do you have any suggestions as to how I might further massage the data?
OK, will do. Appreciate that you provided the link, ~graffiti. And thank you ever so much for your keen insights, advice, and willingness to take the time to read and answer my questions.
I had the same problem. However it allowed me to use the 'pencil'. I picked yellow and the option to the far right which looks like a large box filled with shaded grey boxes. I am now using yellow pencil with the shade as my highlighter. The shade allows you to see the text better, as yellow on its own is quite loud.
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