[hankey]

I work on a Mac in a mostly windows environment. Someone was in a rush to get something scanned, so I did it on my firewire Epson 4990 ( a great scanner). He said he wanted it in PDF, so I scanned the pages, made one document with InDesign and shipped off a PDF. He was disappointed because the PDF wasn't searchable. He then showed me how he could scan with his usb scanner (very slow, that's why I did it), and the resulting PDF was searchable. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif
Now, I will probably never need this feature, but I'm a little bugged that a windows with a crappy usb scanner can do something I can't. I'm assuming it's a software thing. He had an option to scan as images and text. I had just done eps files for image quality. His scans looked the same in the PDF window, but were searchable.
Any suggestions

[Graeme_Smith]

I think why his PDF was searchable is because he has some software that will take the scanned image and convert it in to text, while in your PDF it was just a bitmap (image), not text. So you need some software that can turn the scan of text in to real text. Did any software come with your scanner? Maybe it came with an OCR? (Optical Character Recognition).

[almaink]

If you scan it with Acrobat Pro then use the Page Capture feature it will be searchable.

[moose_n_squirrel]

My Acrobat 6 (paid version, not free version) has an OCR module built in. They call it Paper Capture. You can scan, OCR, and PDF it in one go, then you can search it. Maybe that's what they did in the office.

[Martian]

It is fine to use OCR for searching, but I hope that the actual scanned PDF output is not an OCR product. Any important OCR output must be carefully proofread by wetware scrutiny.

[moose_n_squirrel]

From what I read in the help file the way PDF OCR works is the OCR'd words are on a hidden layer and can be corrected. That's what's searched. The original scan is visible on top so you still have the actual picture of the document.

[Martian]

Wow! I didnt know PDFs were so sophisticated.
It is kind of weird though to have a hidden, edit-proof layer that secretly disagrees with the exposed layer. I wonder if this layer can, in certain special circumstances, cause baffling or even disastrous surprises.

[hankey]

Thanks for the posts. I can do what I wanted in Acrobat Pro 7.0. I used the Create PDF/from Scanner feature and it gave me the option to OCR as well as create PDF. I didn't want a strictly OCR based file, because then you run into the spell check issues and line/box recognition. The PDF with OCR through Acrbat was what I was looking for.