Importing Previously Scanned Documents into Acrobat

If you already have a scanned document or an electronic fax saved on your hard drive in a graphics format such as TIFF or BMP (the Tagged Information File Format and Bitmap format are most commonly used for saving scanned images), you can open the file in Acrobat 6 and then process its pages with the Paper Capture plug-in (as described in the previous section). Note that in order for the Paper Capture plug-in to render a searchable PDF document, the source document must be scanned at a resolution setting between 200 and 600 dpi. To open the scanned graphic file in Acrobat, follow these steps:

1. Choose File➪Create PDF➪From File to display the Open dialog box.
2. Browse to the folder that contains the graphics file containing the scanned image and click its file icon. If the graphics file is saved in a graphics format other than TIFF, select this file format in the Files of Type drop-down list (the Show drop-down list on the Mac) so that its file icon is displayed in the Open dialog box.
3. Click the Open button. The scanned graphic is displayed in the Document window in Acrobat.
4. To save the graphics file as a PDF file, choose File➪Save, and then edit the filename and the folder in which you want to save it (if desired) before clicking the Save button.
5. To make the text in the new PDF file searchable, choose Document➪ Paper Capture➪Start Capture. The Paper Capture dialog box opens.
6. To modify the Paper Capture settings before using it to process the pages of your PDF document, click the Edit button to open the Paper Capture Settings dialog box. Otherwise, skip to Step 11.
7. Select the language of the text in the Primary OCR Language dropdown list.
8. In the PDF Output Style drop-down list, select one of the following:
• To be able to both search and edit the text, select the Formatted Text & Graphics option.
• To make the document text searchable only, select the Searchable Image (Exact) option.
• To make the text in a document containing many images searchable, select the Searchable Image (Compact) option instead.
9. To compress the graphics in the PDF document, select the amount of compression in the Downsample Images drop-down list. Your choices are Low (300 dpi), Medium (150 dpi), or High (72 dpi).
10. Click OK to close the Paper Capture Settings dialog box and return to the Paper Capture dialog box.
11. Click OK in the Paper Capture dialog box to begin the page processing.
12. Choose File➪Save a second time to save your changes. After processing the pages of a scanned image that you’ve saved as a PDF document with Paper Capture, if you used the Formatted Text & Graphics output style, you can locate and eliminate all OCR errors in the text by following the steps in the preceding post, “Correcting Paper Capture boo-boos.”