Subcultureoftwo_small
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Strange fragmentation with making a PDF with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Pro

I'm scanning a huge pile of historical documents and making them into a PDF before I send them to the archives, and I'm noticing a weird thing. The documents scan perfectly, but when I'm finished scanning and Adobe does its conversion/rasterization thing, some of the pages are coming out fragmented.

The pages that have very clear type on them turn out fine. It's the ones where the ink is faded or the paper is yellowed that are having problems, especially if there's handwriting rather than type.

I'm wondering if it's because Adobe is trying to do the text-recognition thing and failing at it. Whatever it's trying to do, I want it to stop, because it's ruining my scans. If it just left the scanned page as-is, it would be fine. My thinking is that there must be some setting I can turn off, but I don't know what it is.

Here are some examples:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10815044@N05/4793178015/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10815044@N05/4793177677

At best, it's just distracting (first picture). At worst, it makes whole chunks of text unreadable, or it erases them (second picture).

Help?

Sacrelicious asked in Geek Week about 1 year ago | Report
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  • Tonks_small
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    This isn't my particular area of expertise, but this thread implies that you can turn of the OCR option, and that would be the first thing I would try. As you said, it looks like it's trying to recognize something in the document and mangling it, where you just want it to save the PDF without doing and conversions.

    http://objectmix.com/adobe-acrobat/214493-disabling-recognize-text-using-ocr-option.html

    Anthony Hecht answered in Geek Week about 1 year ago | Report
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