Over the last six engagements, OCR failures on vendor invoices forced me to re‑key amounts and wasted two days per eng…
Open the scanned PDF in Adobe Acrobat.
Check if the document is an image-only PDF by attempting to select or search for text.
NoteOCR cannot recognize text if the PDF does not contain images or if the text is already selectable.
Go to Tools and select Recognize Text.
Click Recognize Text and choose In This File.
Review the OCR output for errors or missed text by scrolling through the document.
If OCR accuracy is poor, check the scan quality: ensure the document is at least 300 dpi, not skewed, and has high contrast.
Best practiceLow-resolution, blurry, or skewed scans are the most common causes of OCR failure.
Rescan the original document at 300 dpi or higher, using RGB mode for discolored or older pages.
Best practiceFor best results, avoid scanning with excessive brightness and ensure pages are flat and unmarked.
Repeat the OCR process on the improved scan.
Manually correct any remaining OCR errors by clicking on suspect words to edit and accept corrections directly.
NoteYou can click on suspect words to edit and accept corrections directly.
Save the corrected PDF.
If OCR still fails, try rescanning your document at a higher resolution and check for skewed or blurry pages before running OCR again.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
This error means the page you are trying to OCR already has real, selectable text. OCR is designed for image-only pages, like scanned documents, to convert picture-text into real text. If the page already has text, Acrobat cannot apply OCR again, so it shows this message. You should only use OCR on pages that are images.
If your scanned document is blurry, the OCR accuracy will be low. Blurry text is hard for the software to read, just like it's hard for a person to read. Try to rescan the document at a higher quality, like 300 dpi, to get a clearer image before running OCR.
Selecting the correct language helps OCR software recognize words more accurately. OCR uses language-specific dictionaries and patterns to identify characters and words. If you choose the wrong language, the software might misinterpret letters or fail to recognize common words, leading to more errors in the converted text. Always set the language to match the document's content.
Yes, the Adobe PDF Services API allows you to automate OCR for multiple documents. You can use the 'OCR PDF' operation by sending a POST request to its endpoint. This is useful for batch processing large numbers of scanned PDFs, converting image text to searchable layers for archiving or indexing. You would typically write a script to loop through your documents and send each one to the API.