Dylanz Net

Oh boy! I don’t gush about software often, but there is one cool feature that has me absolutely gaagaa over Adobe Acrobat. First, disclaimer for you….I hate paper. O.K. hate is a strong word…I *love* paper, but can never seem to get it filed away properly. I have lots of paper. Stacks of magazine articles. Stacks of important letters. Stacks and stacks of words all hanging around because I *might* need them someday. And I have indeed, been pleased with the words many years after first finding them. So I have no complaints about keeping the words. The paper however, I can do without.
And yet, the paper seems to keep accumulating.
So I purchased a ScanSnap S500. Best tool since the toaster. You install some software, put it on your desk, plug it into your USB port, press one button, and all the paper turns into pdf documents. All very cool.
Except, if you have a lot of pdfs like I do, you will eventually want to run a search on those pdfs. And usually you cannot. The scanned text is just an image. I know what you are thinking. You can run that scanned image through an Optical Character Recogniztion engine and now, you get the scanned text, but you can search, highlight and underline it with Adobe. Cool. I’m hip to this concept.
But try as I might, I still did not like the way the scanned text just never really looked….right. The page is always just a degree or maybe even a degree and a half tilted. The scanned letters have little….how shall we call them….discrepancies? deformations? blobs? I don’t know…but it is not the same as the pristine text I see when looking at a word document or a document *printed* as a pdf.

Well now all of that has changed. With Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.0, there is a feature called *clear scan*. This is game changing. I ran a batch process on 20MB of pdfs that I had scanned from various sources…newspapers, magazines, white papers, etc. In the batch commands, I selected *clear scan* and *optimize*. When the batch was done, I had 13MB of pdfs, and when I looked at the text I was really impressed with the clear scan results!

Jagged letters were replaced by perfect text with fonts that matched the original. File after file, I checked and was amazed. The degree and a half that was titled was corrected. The text that was less than perfect in the original was perfected in the optimized file. It was a sight to behold.
If you have Acrobat 9.0, look for this feature and give it a try. You may never go back to regular scanning.
D

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.