Acrobat 7’s nifty optical character recognition
(aka Call off the search, I found Spock)

The other day I discovered that Acrobat 7 Pro has built-in OCR (optical character recognition). So I decided to run some scanned pages of text through to see how well it works.

Well, it actually does work, and with surprising accuracy, though the resulting document was nearly double the file size of the original. It’s really cool though, because Acrobat layers the OCR’d text invisibly over the image, making it look like you can select, copy and search the imaged text directly from the PDF.

But the point of this is, that while running some basic search strings on the doc to verify its accuracy, I unintentionally did something funny:

searchforspock.png
I guess Spock wasn’t on the Genesis Planet after all. Now if we could only find out why he’s not at the iTunes Store…

Here’s a video podcast of Acrobat’s OCR in action. [creativesuitepodcast.com. requires Quicktime]