I just got a scanned deposition transcript in low-resolution TIFFs and I must find specific testimony before a motion …
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.
A searchable text layer is an invisible layer of text placed over the image in your PDF. This layer allows you to search for words and copy text, even though the original document was just an image. It makes your scanned documents as useful as digital ones.
OCR fails with 'page contains renderable text' because the tool is designed only for pages that are entirely images. If any part of the page already has real, selectable text, Acrobat thinks the page is not an image and stops the OCR process. It only adds a text layer to image-only content.
Choosing the correct language is very important because OCR software uses language-specific rules and dictionaries to recognize characters and words. If you select the wrong language, the OCR engine will make more mistakes, leading to inaccurate text recognition and many errors in the searchable layer.
Yes, you can automate the OCR process for many documents using the Adobe PDF Services API. The 'OCR PDF' operation allows you to send PDF files with image-based text to the service. It will convert the image text into a searchable layer, which is very useful for archiving and indexing large numbers of documents automatically.