Acrobat for Legal Professionals

June 28, 2007

Full Text Search of PDF using Adobe Acrobat

Lately, everyone’s been asking me to help them find themselves…

After a talk at the Missouri Solo and Small Firm conference, I chatted with a solo real estate attorney who asked for my advice on developing a searchable article archive from the materials he had collected over the years. “How do I find the articles I need?” he asked.

I also talked to a lawyer who took on a probono criminal defense case. “How can I find where my client is mentioned in all the police records I was sent?” she asked.

And, at the 2007 LegalTech West show, a workman’s compensation investigator asked how to search medical records. “How can I apply notes to these handwritten medical records and find them later?” he asked.

In this article, I’ll discuss how to use Acrobat Professional to create a full-text index so you can find what you need… fast!

Read on to learn more…

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June 13, 2007

Acrobat 8.1 Update: Fix for Renderable Text Issue

Normally, a dot release to one of Adobe’s major product offerings isn’t that exciting.

Besides offering support for Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, the latest dot release to Acrobat 8 (v8.1) offers an OCR enhancement that will be very welcome indeed!

Acrobat 8.1 offers a fix to a most vexing OCR problem— the dreaded renderable text error:

Renderable Text Error Warning Dialog

Renderable Text is vector (computer generated) text that is placed on top of an image layer.

You may encounter this error if when you try to OCR an image-only PDF containing a Bates stamp. In some federal court districts, stamped image-only PDFs are commonly distributed.

The Acrobat 8.1 Update offers a fix that works for just about every file that has Bates stamps.

For a complete list of fixes in the 8.1 Update, check out this Adobe Knowledge Base Article. (Opens in a new window)

Read on to learn how to get the Acrobat 8.1 Update and some limitations of the fix.

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June 12, 2007

Troubleshooting Acrobat OCR

Searchable PDFs are critical in litigation and matter management. Using Acrobat's OCR function, you can turn mountains of paper into searachable PDFs that look just like the original.

Occasionally, you may run into some issues.

Read on to learn about some workarounds and key considerations.

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09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments [10]