Quickly Converting Outlined Text to Live Text in Acrobat

One of the very cool, but under-utilized features in Adobe Acrobat is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I've found it very useful, at times, when receiving a PDF or Illustrator file from a print vendor or other source where some copy I need to have live is outlined (vector). If you open the file in Acrobat and run OCR you can convert the vector type into live type, then copy it or save it as a text file. This will also work on text documents which you scan.

Here's how you can do it. Simply open the file in Acrobat Pro (I'm assured this works in Acrobat Reader as well). Go to Document > OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text Using OCR. There are options you can select by clicking on 'Edit...'. You can switch to a different language, but only select the language of the document. The output style and resolution usually work best at 'Searchable Image' and 600 dpi. Click OK. The OCR will run and convert the text. Select the copy with the text selection tool or export the file as Text (accessible). You can now paste the copy text or open the text file in a text app.

Now one caveat is that the Acrobat OCR is not very good at converting small copy. In those cases you'll want to scale up from the original file by at least 200% or more. Then bring the scaled up type image into Acrobat to run the OCR.

Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you.