That’s the ideal case, where the original paper copy meets all of the above criteria.īut I’ve scanned thousands of pages from paper that contain errors resulting from OCR problems, because the criteria listed above were not met in the original document. I’ve scanned and OCR’d hundreds of pages from paper with no errors at all in the resulting PDF+text. If the scanned paper copy is “clean” (no marks or blemishes), was scanned at an adequate resolution for OCR (usually at least 300 dots per inch), the text image is a “standard” font that’s 12-point or higher, there are not mixed fonts near each other, and there aren’t graphics closely juxtaposed to text, you should expect very good accuracy, few if any errors. But I don’t expect OCR to attain the human level ability to read and convert an image of text to computer-readable text within the next ten or twenty years, if ever. The overall accuracy of OCR software has improved dramatically over the last ten years or so. The reason is that no OCR software can read and convert the text in an image-only PDF as accurately as can a human. It isn’t caused by DTPO’s indexing of the text content, but by OCR errors in converting an image-only PDF to PDF+Text. The problem you have encountered is not uncommon.

There is a certain urgency for this problem, as I don’t want to be forced to re-import and edit all the papers that I’m about to import. Surely someone must have figured out what exactly causes DT to not be able to index text in a pdf that works perfectly in Preview and Acrobat (Reader)? So, my question: How would I go about solving this issue? Because I have Acrobat, I can change most anything about a pdf (barring certain security settings). I simply don’t have the time to manually test for every paper if it is indexed correctly. The problem is that it doesn’t always work, and when it doesn’t, this seems completely arbitrary. It’s been mentioned that changing the index settings ‘might’ help, and sometimes only slightly.

Obviously, when searching for ‘attitude’ in a text doesn’t work, if DT’s indexes it as ‘a t titu de’. Once imported, I found that DT puts spaces in words, in seemingly arbitrary places. I was happy to discover the OCR process worked like a dream I could do searches within Acrobat with no trouble whatsoever. In my quest to use DT for all my research papers, I first had to buy Adobe Acrobat to turn image pdf’s into recognisable text, and to be able to comment and edit those papers. It’s been mentioned before, but I haven’t found a ‘proper’ answer yet.

Ocr pdf acrobat