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JACOD IWINSKI, PENN STATE STUDENT: Welcome to the tutorial for how to use Adobe Acrobat professional to OCR or automatically recognize characters within your PDF documents. First, make sure you have Adobe Acrobat professional installed as it will not work with Adobe Reader DC. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat professional installed, go to Adobe.psu.edu for more information or contact your local IT department.

Now that we've gone over the software necessary, let's go over what exactly OCR is and what it can do for you. This is an example of a PDF that was created from a scan of a book. So, the book is merely a photo that has been turned into PDF form; as such, it shouldn't actually have characters or selectable text in it, but because of Adobe's character recognition software, you can see that we can select and highlight text—even comment or annotate just like it was a Word document that was converted to a PDF. In fact, we can even use the Search function to find specific words in the PDF. This is especially useful if we have a long PDF that we need to find specific words or phrases in.

Now that we've gone over what OCR can do for us, it's important that we go over how to actually OCR a document. So, make sure again you have Adobe Acrobat Professional installed as Adobe Reader will not work, and have the necessary PDFs that you want to annotate [scan] in your computer. Then go to (once you have Adobe Acrobat professional open):

1. Go to the Tools Tab. From here you can:
2. Click Enhance Scans on either the left-hand side or on this right-hand side pull-down tab. These are also available if you click into Adobe Acrobat Professional normally when you open a PDF. Once you've clicked Enhance Scans, you then:
3. Go to Select a File and find the appropriate file you want to enhance on your computer. This process is the same on Windows as well as Mac as Adobe Acrobat Professional does not change. Once you've brought up the Enhanced Scans submenu by opening up the PDF in the Enhanced Scans menu, you will be prompted with this submenu below the normal toolbar.
4. Click Recognize Text in this file or in multiple files. If you use multiple files, this is what Adobe allows us to do batches, so if you wanted to do all of the PDFs or readings for an entire class, you would use the Multiple Files  tab and select a folder that had all of your PDFs for that class in it, and you can do them all in one massive batch.
5. But in this instance, we're going to click in this file. This will bring up a second submenu where you can change settings, like the amount of pages you want to OCR, or the language if it's in another language. But in this instance, we're only going to click Recognize Text.
6. After you've clicked the Recognize Text button, Adobe Acrobat Professional will scan every page in that PDF and give it the appropriate annotations so that you can now select Highlight, annotate, or even use the Find function.

Again, this PDF was created from a book, so this would not be possible without the OCR function in Adobe Acrobat. Everything is done now, and all you have to do is click Save or click Save whenever you exit out of the program. Now if we went back and open up this PDF you can see we can still select and highlight text, whereas this PDF which we have not OCR'd does not have that ability and is, therefore, less useful for us as a method of learning.

This concludes the Adobe Acrobat OCR PDF training.