OCR, Adobe Acrobat and Typewriter

Now that you have a scanner and need to copy and paste or word search a document, you need to invest in Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional.

The Adobe Acrobat (version 7 and higher) program has an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program built in. By selecting the OCR option, Acrobat quickly runs through your document and recognizes the characters. This allows you to copy and paste from the Acrobat document, word search and export to word processing documents.

The Adobe Typewriter feature which was released in Acrobat v. 7.05 allows you to activate a "typewriter" so that you can type anywhere on a document. In the legal profession, forms seem common place. SCAO forms, local court forms and vouchers often require a piece of paper be inserted into the dinosaur typewriter for completion.

The Typewriter tool, when activated, allows the user to fill out forms that do not contain interactive fields. Simply put, you can click anywhere on a PDF and type!

To activate the Typewriter tool, from the Tools menu select Typewriter and then again on Typewriter.

To add text to the document, click on the Typewriter icon and click anywhere in the document to begin typing.

For those that do not own a copy of Adobe Standard or Professional, the free-reader can also utilize the Typewriter if the provider of the original document activated the Typewriter tool when they created the document.

Perhaps it is time to finally dispose of that old electronic typewriter!