If you don’t want to use ClearScan the next time you OCR, you’ll need to remember to change it back. Like some other choices in Acrobat, making the change above (Step 4) is a “sticky” setting. Click OK again to OCR your document using ClearScan.In the Settings window, choose ClearScan from the PDF Output Style menu, then click OK.Go to the Recognize Text section and choose In this File.Here’s how to OCR using ClearScan in Acrobat X: Since ClearScan is not the default type of OCR that Acrobat uses, many folks never discover it on their own.

I found that running ClearScan OCR on the documents supplied to me by the customer, that Acrobat could then find difference in the text. You can read more about ClearScan in my article Better PDF OCR.

Each character on the page is compared and all matching characters are replaced with a an outline character: When Searchable Image OCR is performed on a scaned doc, the original scanned image is left in place in the PDF and an invisible layer of searchable text is added.Īcroat 9 introduced a new OCR option called ClearScan designed to enhance the quality of the document post-scan.ĬlearScan works by turning the images which represent text characters on the page into smoothed vector outlines. The type used most frequently by legal professional is searchable image, sometimes referred to as “image+text”. What to do? ClearScan to the RescueĪcrobat offers different “flavors” of OCR. That isn’t always possible if you receive documents from the other side or via the court. When you can, make sure that scanned documents which need to be compared are scanned using identical settings. Fortunately, I was able to come up with a workaround. That’s probably a bug (I reported it), but we all still have a job to do. In effect, Acrobat saw these as being two completely different documents. greyscale) was enough to seriously affect Acrobat’s ability to detect changes. The difference in color space (black and white vs. One document was scanned in black and white.The source documents were scanned documents.I was able to examine the documents and discovered that:

The firm reported that during comparison, Acrobat couldn’t find any differences in the documents, even though visual differences were apparent during a visual inspection. Recently, I received an email from a law firm that was having trouble comparing two PDFs. In Acrobat X Pro, the Document Comparison feature is available by choosing View>Compare Documents.įor a brief demonstration of this feature, click here. Comparing Scanned Documents Tips and WorkaroundsĪcrobat Pro includes tools that allow you to compare two PDFs to quickly spot the differences.

Compare two pdf files acrobat 9