Acrobat for Legal Professionals

October 27, 2005

Batch OCR using Acrobat Professional

Acrobat's OCR function allows you to turn paper or TIFF files into searchable PDFs. Great!

What happens when someone gives you a hundreds of image-only PDFs or TIFFs?

Batch OCR can turn these files into searchable PDFs fast!

Using Acrobat 7.0 Professional to do Batch OCR

You have a problem . . . You have lots of TIFFs and Image-only PDFs file that you need to search for a big case. You need to convert all of these files to searchable PDFs fast.


Working with these documents one at a time, you'll never meet your deadline.


What to do?


If you have Acrobat Professional, you can batch OCR and let you computer do the work for you.


Batch Processing to the Rescue


There are two steps to follow:



  1. Set up a Batch Sequence
  2. Run a Batch Sequence

Set up a Batch Sequence


Scan your documents locally or send to a PC where Acrobat Pro is installed.


If you have the capability of scanning directly to PDF or to an MTIFF (multi-page TIFF). These formats allow all of the pages of a document to maintained as a group.



  1. In Acrobat Professional, choose Advanced-->Batch Processing
  2. Click the New Sequence button.

    new_sequence.gif

  3. Give the sequence a name.
  4. Click Select Commands

  5. Choose Recognize Text Using OCR and click the Add button.
    select_commands.gif


  6. Double-click the Recognize Text using OCR text (right side of the window) to set OCR Options.

    select_commands2.gif

  7. Set Downsample Images to 300 dpi. Click OK

    set_settings.gif

  8. Click OK again to get back to the main window.
  9. Click Output Options.

    Note: Output options allows you specify where the OCR’d files should be written. I suggest writing them to a local drive and copying later to a network store..

  10. Enable PDF Optimizer and Do not overwrite existing files.

    Click the Settings Button.

    Adjust the settings to make the smallest possible files: JBIG2 Lossy in the Black and White area

    Note: Do not be concerned about the lossy setting. It results in 30-40% smaller file sizes with an almost imperceptible visual difference.

    pdf_optimizer_settings.gif

  11. Click OK. Give the revised settings a name such as “B&W Lossy”.



Run a Batch Sequence



  1. Choose Advanced-->Batch Processing
  2. Select the sequence to run
  3. Click OK
  4. Select the folder to process

    Click the Select button.

  5. Select the Output Folder

    Posted by Rick Borstein at 03:23 PM on October 27, 2005

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