OCRing a PDF to a Copy and Paste Document, without typical Misspellings, gaps, etc.
1a. Scan the item on the Epson or on the scanners at Sheridan.
1b. Save a separate copy of the PDF to be OCR'd;
2. Open the PDF to be OCR'd and "Blue" it, by just trying to highlight something;
3. Once it is Blue, right click on the document and go to "Recognize Text Using OCR", at the bottom of the options;
4. A window pops up >> check "All pages" >> click "OK".
5. It then starts processing each page, and takes about 4-5 seconds per page, and goes through the entire document. When it is done, then you can copy and paste the exact wording on the orgininal document onto a Word doc, and Excel doc, etc., and there are no misspellings, gaps, odd symbols, etc, that are frequently found on documents that have been converted from PDF to text.
6. There are cases where the 'Recognize Text Using OCR" option does not appear, and so you can't use that method. In that case, do the following: First save a copy of the PDF, and add the name OCR;
If it is only a portion of the PDF you want to OCR , go to that portion. But if you want to OCR the whole PDF, then the next step in any case is: Click on the small rectangular icon box with a capital T in it and a pencil beside it at the very top. >> This creates a little dotted open book type cursor.>>
If you try to highlight something, a window will appear asking if you would like to enable character recognition, and you click OK. >>
The system then OCRs just the page or pages you select to be OCR’d, or the whole document, if you do not select specific pages>>
Then instead of highlighting the text with the dotted open book that appears as the cursor after the OCRing is done (which turns the text yellow, if you do use the "open book cursor) click on the square box with the “I” and the head of an arrow in it, and it will turn off the “yellow” icon and enable you to highlight in blue and copy and paste whatever segment you want onto a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, etc.
Be sure to "Save" the changes, or the document will go back to being non-OCR'd. You can then close the PDF document.
Some PDF documents are already OCR’d and you can copy a segment at will just as they are on the internet. I tried this with a few of the PDFs I brought up with “Filetype:PDF and it worked fine in pasting into Word. In fact, all of the PDFs I opened were already OCR’d, so I could copy and paste from them at will. But I am sure that many are not OCR’d , especially the PDFs in Google books;
A third method to OCR the PDFs is to open the PDF in Adobe Pro XI >>Edit Text >> Text Recognition (near bottomon right) >> In this File >> goes to the regular window where you just click OK.