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Topic: After OCR in Acrobat 7.0.8 and save, some text is garbled
Conf: (P-PDF) What's Wrong with my PDF?, Msg: 151718
From: dbindle
Date: 7/5/2006 07:16 AM

I'm currently trying to create searchable pdf's of fairly long documents... namely theses and dissertations.

I've had success creating a searchable pdf by using the "Recognize text using OCR" function with a clean "image only" scanned pdf document.

Now I'm trying to OCR a pdf that was probably scanned from microfilm and the text is clearly not as crisp.

I realize the OCR is not going to be as accurate, but if that text is hidden behind the scanned image... 90% accuracy could possibly be enough. The problem is... is that after the OCR, the pdf page is "re-imaged" and it seems like the words that the OCR choked on... are now distorted or garbled. Some letters are made to look worse... some words have spelling mistakes... some are bolded etc...

Can't I OCR the documents... and have the OCR'd text (poor as it might be) hidden in the background, but still have the originally scanned image being shown to the user who opens up the pdf to read it?

Thanks for any help
David