Any PDF wizards in the house?

**{{909}}** · 9th January 2012

I've got a bunch of scanned books in PDF format, mostly text with a few line drawings etc, the text is quite clear but isnt all straight and looks a bit patchy when printed. They are ESL books (teaching) so it would be nice if they were as clear as poss in the first place as they will no doubt get photocopied multiple times.

Anyway, is there any way to have a proggy 'read' the scanned text and replace it with 'proper text'? as you can see I'm lost on the terminology a bit

Cheers, my dears.

**Zoots** · 9th January 2012

Bunch of promising results here mate.

**stimpy** · 9th January 2012

The full version of Acrobat has OCR capability. I've never actually had to use it though, so I don't know how good it is.

**{{909}}** · 9th January 2012

OCR! thats what I couldnt think of, was driving me nuts. cheers chaps, I'll give acrobat and those others a try.

**mc.dodd** · 9th January 2012

@ {{909}} check VIP

**pattikins** · 9th January 2012

Abbyy Finereader is very good @ converting pdf images to text etc. If it's not in the VIP section pm me.

**{{909}}** · 10th January 2012

I've been using able2extract, it seems to work ok with text and black and white photos but trips up on line drawings, trying to convert them to text. I could run through each page manually but that would take too fucking long!
Will have a look in VIP

Cheers all