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Open your scanned PDF in Adobe Acrobat.
Go to All tools and select Scan & OCR.
From the left panel, select Enhance Scans.
Adjust the image borders if needed by dragging the blue handles to tightly frame the document content.
Use the available enhancement options to deskew, adjust contrast, and remove background as needed for clarity.
Best practiceImproving contrast and removing background noise before OCR can significantly increase text recognition accuracy, especially for faded or uneven scans.
Click Apply to save the image enhancements.
Return to the Scan & OCR pane and select Recognize Text.
Choose In This File to run OCR on the current document.
Click Recognize Text to start the OCR process.
NoteIf the document was previously OCR'd, Acrobat may prompt to re-recognize text; confirm to proceed if needed.
Save the enhanced, OCR-processed PDF.
Enhancing the image before running OCR helps Acrobat recognize text more accurately in poor-quality scans.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
| Feature | Regular PDF (from scan) | OCR'd PDF (after recognition) |
|---|---|---|
| Text Selectable/Searchable | No, text is part of an image | Yes, text can be selected and searched |
| File Size | Often larger if high resolution image | Can be slightly larger due to text layer, but more functional |
| Copy/Paste Text | Cannot copy text | Can copy and paste text |
Acrobat gives this error because the OCR feature is designed only for pages that are images. If a page already has real, selectable text, Acrobat will not try to recognize text on it again. This means the page might already be searchable, or it might be a mix of image and text where OCR isn't needed for the text parts.
OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a technology that converts images of text into actual, editable, and searchable text. For scanned documents, this is important because scans are just pictures. Without OCR, you cannot search for words, copy text, or edit the document. OCR makes your scanned documents functional and easy to manage.
OCR can still work on old or hard-to-read documents, but its accuracy might be lower. The clearer the original scan, the better the OCR results. If the text is very faded, blurry, or uses an unusual font, Acrobat might struggle to recognize all characters correctly. You might need to manually fix some recognition errors after the process is complete.