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MBHockey

macrumors 601
Original poster
Oct 4, 2003
4,050
297
Connecticut
Hey all, need some advice from the pros.

I recently scanned in a few textbooks to my uncle's computer using Adobe Acrobat X. I scanned them all with the same settings, using ClearScan for OCR. They came out great. But after having opened them in Preview on 10.8.2 (on my computer), the files are no longer searchable! I think Preview did something weird with saving the file and i can no longer search for text in there. is there any way to get it back?

I tried to re-run ClearScan on them but i get a "this page contains renderable text" error when I try to do that.

Is there any way to make the text searchable again? I really, really don't want to have to scan the books again. They are over 500 pages each!

:confused:
 

yojitani

macrumors 68000
Apr 28, 2005
1,858
10
An octopus's garden
Hey all, need some advice from the pros.

I recently scanned in a few textbooks to my uncle's computer using Adobe Acrobat X. I scanned them all with the same settings, using ClearScan for OCR. They came out great. But after having opened them in Preview on 10.8.2 (on my computer), the files are no longer searchable! I think Preview did something weird with saving the file and i can no longer search for text in there. is there any way to get it back?

I tried to re-run ClearScan on them but i get a "this page contains renderable text" error when I try to do that.

Is there any way to make the text searchable again? I really, really don't want to have to scan the books again. They are over 500 pages each!

:confused:

This is terrible, I wrote a long, detailed response to this and it was lost! I had to log back in to post, the page went blank and my response was lost. I'm sorry for the vastly abbreviated reply now.

1. Sorry for the necromancy.
2. Apple knows about this.
3. There is a way to get OCR back without rescanning the book, here's how:

Get your OCR back:
1. Export the entire pdf as image files, preferably tiff or png format, high quality.
2. Remake the pdf with the image files. You might use Preview for this. Preview + png gives me the best results.
3. OCR the newly made pdf.
4. Set your default pdf viewer and editor to anything else. I use Skim, but don't think it's great.

I can answer questions about this since I'm in no mood to fill in details now.
 
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