Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used as a form of data entry from some sort of original paper data source, whether documents, sales receipts, mail, or any number of printed records. It is a common method of digitizing printed texts so that they can be electronically searched, stored more compactly, displayed on-line, and used in machine processes such as machine translation, text-to-speech and text mining. OCR is a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision.
The following departments have at least one copy of Abode Acrobat Professional:
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Here are instructions for converting a PDF image file–such as one scanned by our BizHub MFDs–into searchable and copyable text using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro for Mac:
- Open the document you wish to convert.
- Hover over “OCR Text Recognition” in the Document menu and select “Recognize Text using OCR”. (You may also convert more than one file at a time by selecting “Recognize Text in Multiple Files Using OCR…)
- Click OK on the Recognize Text window. (You may tweak the settings here if you’d like but the defaults will work fine.)
- Acrobat will display a status window at bottom right and, when it is finished, the document will be searchable. You may now select and copy distinct parts of the text.
- Save your converted file. It is now ready to be scanned by SafeAssign or used in other ways.