Strikethrough in ABBYY/PDF

[eurotrash]

Hiya,

Hope this is the correct forum to post in. I need a bit of help with ABBYY FineReader.

Basically I scanned a book using OpticBook 3600. Then I used ABBYY 9 Pro for OCR. Everything's going decently enough, but this book (on writing) contains text with strikethrough font. I can see the strikethrough in the OCR'd text, and if I save it as a Word document it keeps the strikethrough. However, if I save it directly as a PDF, it removes the strikethrough. (I use Acrobat Pro 9 as my PDF application.)

One option would be to save my book as a Word document and then convert it to PDF. I tried this and it retains the strikethrough on conversion to PDF, but this isn't a good option because Word doesn't keep the original formatting, i.e. it squishes letters and doesn't keep text on a straight line in certain places.

If I save it as PDF, the structure is perfect; i.e. letters are spaced just as in the book, straight columns in all the nooks and crannies. Of course, in that case I lose my strikethrough.

So ideally I'm hoping that someone here will know a way that the strikethrough can be retained when saving to PDF. However, I googled it and it doesn't look promising.

Another thing I thought of doing is saving as PDF, and then editing the PDF with some other application to add the strikethrough. Acrobat has no strikethrough option, so I'd have to use another program. However, Word doesn't open PDF files - is there some other text-editing program that can be used to edit PDF files?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

[slayda]

This solution may not be what you're looking for but I purchased "PDF Converter" from Nuance Corp that acts as a plugin for Word to open and creat PDF files.

[RWood]

Originally Posted by slayda

This solution may not be what you're looking for but I purchased "PDF Converter" from Nuance Corp that acts as a plugin for Word to open and creat PDF files.

Their full version sells for $99US and does have a 30 day free trial. The questions is: Can you add strikeout to characters in their direct PDF edit module. (I think the answer is "no.")

I have never run into the problem that you describe (then again I have never converted anything with strikeout text in it.) Other than highlighting the strikeout areas with another background color I can come up with no good answer and that one is not a good answer as it alters the look of the original document.

Good luck.

[Jellby]

PDF was not designed to be editable, so it's not so easy to alter the text once it's there... but surely Acrobat must offer the possibility of adding lines, not as a property of the text, but on top of the text (or whatever).

[DDHarriman]

Hi

At the moment I do not have a paper document with streaked text on it to test, but…

It looks that Finereader sees and recognizes correctly streaked text, but sets it as a “style”, or in other words the normal word and but formatted with a “strike” style.
So when you save it in word or any other “style” friendly format, it shows the striked words, in formats not so friendly to that it does not show it.

One way to do it is rather cumbersome; it’s doing it “by hand” in acrobat, using the “cross out text tool” in the “review and comment” tool bar.
Besides being a very work intense way, it does it by default in red, if you want to choose to any other colour you will have to change it.

Sorry to not be of more help,

[eurotrash]

Thanks everyone for replying. And DDHarriman, I didn't know that could be done - that's a great way for me; it may be time consuming, but at least I don't have to have conversion tools messing with the layout.