[Hitch]

I wanted to add an interesting experience here, that I just dealt with, yesterday.

A longish story as short as possible--I was contacted by a prospective client, who had typed his Opus on a Brother dedicated WP, back in the mid-'90s. Had it in print, so had that scanned, a few years back. Of course, it turned out that the pdf is an image-only PDF, no text layer.

I'd started to tell the client that we'd have to OCR it again, yadda, but...on a flyer, I ran it through OCR, in Acrobat Pro. Then, I exported the new PDF, which now had a text layer, to Word.

And I'll be dammed, but the resulting file is NOT horrible. I mean, with a modicum of cleanup--not beyond the regular person--it could be entirely usable. I was pretty gobsmacked because the source PDF was not wonderful. It wasn't the worst I've ever seen (a scanned copy of a multiply-faxed document--that was the worst), but it wasn't crisp, either, and the pages were not wildly straight. But it worked, and the resulting Word file was not bad at all.

So...there are, sometimes, shortcuts to the Abbyy scan/OCR process that can work. I would not have ever thought that they existed; in a decade, I've never seen it work before, but it did this time. I would then suggest that you at least try the shortcut methods, to see if you can pull one out of the hat, too. It's worth the 5-10 minutes' of time, compared to what the longer routes take.

Hitch