Accessibility

The usual suspects

 

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Created:
16 May 2005
User Level:
Intermediate, Advanced
Products:
Acrobat undefined or later

Excerpted from "Adobe Acrobat 7 Tips & Tricks: The 150 Best" by Donna Baker, © 2005. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc.

Here are some tips for working with scanned or image documents with a minimum of suspects in Adobe® Acrobat® 7.0:

  • Evaluate the content of the document. Determine whether you can simply scan or create an image PDF (such as those you create in Photoshop), or whether you must scan and capture the document, creating editable, searchable text.
  • If you plan to capture the content, scan using specific resolutions—scan black and white at 200–600 dpi, with 300 dpi an optimal resolution, and scan at 200–400 for grayscale or color. Acrobat requires a minimum of 144 dpi to perform OCR; otherwise you see a warning message and have to rescan or reconvert the image.
  • Not all fonts and colors scan well. In the sample document, the decorative “T” wasn’t recognized as a letter, and much of the font information is lost when converting to letters. The word “before” isn’t captured at all since it overlays the background graphic.
  • Use OCR fonts if possible, or any clear font at about 12 points. Black text on a white background scans and converts the best while colored or decorative fonts are the most difficult.