Scanned documents make it easier for you to archive stacks of papers in your computer, enabling better document organization and saving considerable storage space. However, if you want to find information related to a certain word or phrase, you need to open all files and read through them to find it. With OCR (Optical Character Recognition), text on scanned documents becomes searchable so that you can easily search or edit the contents.

OCR transforms images of printed text into machine-readable, searchable and editable text. Afterwards, you are able to comment with text markup tools and make changes to the text in the document.

Run OCR on an existing PDF

You can run OCR to make your scanned documents searchable and editable in order to comment or mark up with reviewing and commenting tools. Note that OCR cannot be performed on pages with renderable text (computer generated text placed on top of an image layer).

 

Run OCR on the current document

  1. Open a PDF document you want to run OCR on in Right PDF Editor.

  2. Choose Advanced > Text Recognition > OCR and select Current File from the options.

  3. In the OCR Text Recognition dialog box, adjust the OCR settings as desired:

    • Page Range. Choose to recognize all pages, the current page or selected pages.

    • Auto orient pages: once checked, Right PDF Editor will automatically adjust page orientation.

    • PDF type: choose an output type.

      • Searchable: extract text from images so that text becomes searchable.

      • Searchable and editable: convert images containing text into searchable and editable text.

      • MRC PDF Document: compress images using MRC.

      • Searchable MRC: compress images using MRC and make text searchable.

    • MRC compression: set a compression ratio using the slider bar. The higher the ratio, the smaller the file and poorer the quality. MRC separates text elements from images/background, and applies optimized compression on each element.

    • Languages to recognize: select OCR language. For optimal result, please select languages appropriate to the document content and pay attention to the following restrictions:

      • Select either only one Asian language, or one or more languages using the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet.

      • Asian cannot be mixed with other languages.
        Note: If your document exceeds these restrictions, select Automatic language detection.

    • Automatic language detection: once selected, Right PDF will detect and apply languages appropriate to each page.

  4. Click OK.

Run OCR on multiple documents

  1. Choose Advanced > Text Recognition > OCR and select Multiple Files from the options.

  2. In the OCR Text Recognition dialog box, browse and select the files to run OCR on, and then click OK:

    • Add Files…. Ctrl-click to select multiple files and click Open to add them to the file list.

    • Add Folders…. Select a folder and click OK to add all files within the selected folder to the file list.

    • Remove. Select a file or ctrl-click to select multiple files and click Remove to remove them from the file list.

    • Include current open files. Check to include all currently open PDF files to the file list.

  3. In the Output Options dialog box, specify where to save and how to name the output PDF files and then click OK:

    • Target Folder. Choose whether to save output PDF files to their original folders or to another folder that you specify.

    • File Naming. Choose to save with the original file names or add prefix/suffix to the original file names. To insert additional characters to the original file names, check Add to original file names and type text in the Insert Before and Insert After boxes so that output files will be named in the form of [Text inserted + original file name + Text inserted .pdf]. If Keep original file names is selected, it is required to check Overwrite existing files to ensure output PDF files overwrite the originals.

  4. Click “OK” and in the OCR Text Recognition dialog box, adjust the OCR settings as desired:

    • Auto orient pages: once checked, Right PDF Editor will automatically adjust page orientation.

    • PDF type: choose an output type.

      • Searchable: extract text from images so that text becomes searchable.

      • Searchable and editable: convert images containing text into searchable and editable text.

      • MRC PDF Document: compress images using MRC.

      • Searchable MRC: compress images using MRC and make text searchable.

    • MRC compression: set a compression ratio using the slider bar. The higher the ratio, the smaller the file and poorer the quality. MRC separates text elements from images/background, and applies optimized compression on each element.

    • Languages to recognize: select OCR language. For optimal result, please select languages appropriate to the document content and pay attention to the following restrictions:

      • Select either only one Asian language, or one or more languages using the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet.

      • Asian cannot be mixed with other languages.
        Note: If your document exceeds these restrictions, select Automatic language detection.

    • Automatic language detection: once selected, Right PDF will detect and apply languages appropriate to each page.

  5. Click OK to start. If the pages contain renderable text, you will be prompted that OCR does not recognize computer generated text.

Correct OCR suspects

The Find Suspects feature finds potential recognition mistakes and offers you options to correct the text. You can use it after the text of scanned documents has been made searchable. Thus, the clearer the original scanned documents are, the fewer suspects this feature will arise.

 

Find and replace OCR suspects

  1. Open a scanned PDF document to run OCR on. Make sure you make a copy of it and work on the copy only.

  2. Choose Advanced > Text Recognition > OCR and select either Current File or Multiple Files from the menu depending on your need. Then, decide whether to make the text searchable, or searchable and editable. See Run OCR on the current document for details.
    Note: Find Suspects works only when you choose to make the text of your scanned document searchable, which retains the look of the original scanned document while making the text searchable.

  3. The text of the document is now searchable and then you can start using Find Suspects to see if there is something that the OCR engine did not recognize correctly and make corrections. Choose Advanced > Text Recognition > Find Suspects and select either of the following depending on your actual need:

    • First OCR Suspect. It identifies the first suspect character for you to confirm. In the Find Element dialog box, click the Find button to highlight the first suspect.

    • All OCR Suspects. It highlights all suspect characters. You can double-click a suspect and correct it in the Find Element dialog box that appears.

  1. In the Find Element dialog box, click Find to highlight suspects. Suspects will be marked on the pages and also displayed in the Original Document Then, work on the suspects using the following options:

    • Click Accept and Find to confirm the interpretation is correct and go to the next suspect. If you believe the OCR engine returned an incorrect result, you can fix it manually and then click Accept and Find to replace it.

    • Click Find Next to go to the next suspect.

    • Click Not Text for the suspect that is not a word.

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