Scan printed permission slips from today’s [event=field trip] into searchable PDFs, add a footer with [student] name a…
Open the scanned PDF file in Adobe Acrobat.
Go to the Tools menu.
Select Scan & OCR from the tools list.
Click Recognize Text and choose In This File.
In the settings panel, ensure PDF Output Style is set to Searchable Image.
Click Recognize to start the OCR process.
Save the PDF after OCR is complete.
Best practiceFor best OCR accuracy, scan your documents at 300 dpi and ensure the images are clear before running OCR.
After OCR completes, you can search, copy, and highlight text in your previously scanned PDF.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a technology that converts images of text into actual text data. It matters for scanned documents because most scanners create image files, which means you cannot search or copy the text. OCR adds a hidden layer of real text, making your scanned documents searchable and editable. This helps with archiving and finding information quickly.
If your scanned permission slips have blurry text, OCR might not work as well. OCR needs clear text to recognize characters correctly. To improve accuracy, try to rescan the slips at a higher quality, like 300 dpi, before running OCR. This will give Acrobat clearer images to work with.
Acrobat says 'page contains renderable text' because the page already has real text, not just an image. The OCR feature is designed to work on image-only pages. If a page already has text, Acrobat thinks it does not need to recognize it. You might see this if your PDF was created from a digital document, not a scan.
For the best OCR results when scanning documents, you should scan at 300 dpi. This resolution provides enough detail for Acrobat to accurately recognize the text. While 72 dpi is the lowest you can use, 300 dpi will give you much better accuracy for text recognition.