Recognize Text in a PDF using Adobe Scan App for iOS

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s quick video, I’ll show you how I convert a PDF file that doesn’t see any text, to one that recognizes text  using the Adobe Scan app. 

I have to read a lot of PDFs for my graduate school program. I like to pull them into the Goodreader app on my iPad and then highlight, comment, and annotate away.  Sometimes though, I will pull in a PDF and find that none of the GoodReader annotation features work because the PDF isn’t recognizing any of the text in the document. It’s just treating that text like an image. This happened recently with a 33 page document.  I really like to be able to highlight passages while I’m reading a PDF, since I save all of the highlighted bits in a spreadsheet — you can see my video on that if you are interested. 

I tried a bunch of options and apps — one offered to convert PDFs to Word documents, but it just made each page an image within the Word document, so that didn’t help my text recognition problem.  A couple of apps, probably made by the same sketchy company, were free to download, but then threatened to take multiple hours to convert your file unless you paid a $10 fee. No thanks.  I ended up using an app that I already love, Adobe Scan. It took a little labor, but not too much for a 33 page file, and the text recognition was done right. 

Adobe Scan is my favorite scanner app or photo to PDF app. It’s quick, has nice features, and does a great job with OCR or optical character recognition.  I don’t have to do nearly as much text clean up as I’ve had to do with other apps. It doesn’t not, however, have the ability to download a 33-page PDF file and do full text recognition on it.  It only accepts photos as input.  But here is the thing — the document is on my iPad where screen shots are super easy AND screen shotting allows me to arrange the pages a little better for reading if they are askew from scanning.  Taking 33 pages worth of screen shots only took me a couple of minutes within the GoodReader app. 

Once I did that, I opened Adobe Scan, chose the Saved Photo rather than the Camera option and navigated to my Camera Roll by hitting Show All Photos. There they all are. Okay — now Adobe Scan lets you chose the pages in order of how you want them in your PDF. One thing to note is that the app will only do text recognition on documents that are 25 pages or less, so I did one document with 25 pages and a second document that contained 8 pages. 

Once I selected them in the order I want them to appear in my PDF, I hit Done. On this screen I can name the file — I’ll call this one “PDF 1” and hit Save PDF.  First Adobe Scan will upload the file to the cloud, then it will begin text recognition. It’s nice that is tells you what it is doing — please note that recognizing text could take several minutes for a long PDF file. You’ll know that it is finished because it will just have the date rather than the status. Once it is finished, I hit Share, then Share File, then choose to open it in GoodReader, but you can choose whichever PDF viewer you like best.  So, now in GoodReader, when I attempt to use a highlighting or other text annotation feature, it recognizes the text.  You can see that in a document without text recognized, it gives me a much more limited menu and I can’t select any text. 

So, it takes a little doing, but is vastly preferable to the alternative, which is typing in each quote manually into my spreadsheet. The couple of minutes it took to create this text recognized PDF ended up saving me a lot of work in the end. Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!