Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Law Technology Blogs -> Acrobat for Legal Professionals

Law Technology

: Acrobat for Legal Professionals

Better PDF OCR. ClearScan is smaller, looks better

By Rick Borstein

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) converts scanned paper documents into searchable PDF documents. This technology has been available in Acrobat for about ten years.

While OCR accuracy and language support have improved over the years, the  default OCR "flavor"— Searchable Image— was the only useful choice.

Searchable Image retains the underlying scanned image and adds an invisible layer of text on top which may be selected:

 

Searchable Image OCR has some shortcomings:

1. File Size
   For 300 dpi black and white scans, a typical file size is 15-40K per page. Scanning at higher resolutions (600 dpi Vs. 300 dpi) increases file size about three to four times.
2. Print Speed
   Because of the image-heavy content, searchable image PDFs can take a long time to print.
3. Visual Quality
   At 300 dpi, scanned documents are easily distinguishable in quality from computer-generated files.

In Acrobat 9, Adobe engineers added a new flavor of OCR called ClearScan. ClearScan offers improved text quality with a decrease in file size:

I've recently completed some benchmarking which shows dramatic file size decreases and quality gains. Read on to learn about size comparisons, how to use ClearScan OCR and a bit more about how it all works.

Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on May 05, 2009 (boomark / email).