3 Replies Latest reply: Oct 7, 2013 4:09 PM by Dave Merchant RSS

    OCR recognition/interactive PDF?

    emily_mfg

      Hi there - I'm wondering if it's possible to have an interactive PDF that is also OCR-enabled. I'm publishing academic articles online as interactive PDFs created in InDesign - with lots of cross-referencing, hyperlinks etc - but would also like their full text to be searchable. Is it possible to do this? And how? I have InDesign CS6 and Adobe Acrobat Pro 10.1.

       

      I did try using the 'Recogize text' function in Acrobat Pro, but came up with an error message about renderable text?

       

      many thanks! Emily

        • 1. Re: OCR recognition/interactive PDF?
          CtDave CommunityMVP

          Textual content mastered in InDesign is searchable when it is processed to become PDF. No OCR needed. Now, when you have that paper with textual content and scan it to an image which is then brought into PDF - well, that PDF page content (the image of the text) is what'd need OCR.

           

           

          Be well...

          • 2. Re: OCR recognition/interactive PDF?
            emily_mfg Community Member

            Thanks so much for your response. I thought that might be the case (since you can select and cut/paste text, etc)... it's just odd as the search engine on our e-publishing system doesn't seem to be recognizing any of the text in the PDFs... I thought it was a problem with the PDF, but perhaps it's an issue with the search function of the site itself.

            • 3. Re: OCR recognition/interactive PDF?
              Dave Merchant CommunityMVP

              Did you apply protection to the PDF to stop people from editing it? A lot of third-party indexing systems will ignore anything that has encryption, even if the text remains searchable.