When you PDF a document that you generate in MS Word, is there a way to produce an "image-only" PDF, with non-searchable text? The only way I know how is to print out and scan the document back into Acrobat.
It's not for me to comment on whether this is fair game or not as you work with the other side, but following is a workaround that will create an image-only, non-searchable PDF from an existing PDF document.
searchable vs non-searchable pdf download
3. OCR PDFs: OCR PDFs are image-based PDFs that have been turned into text-based PDFs. Thus making them fully text-searchable. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used to read the image of the text and add a layer of real text on top, thus converting the document to a text-based PDF.
The PDF file format can be confusing, especially when it comes to understanding what constitutes a "searchable" PDF file. To understand whether a PDF file is searchable, you have to look at its origin.
First, a PDF file can originate with a file on your computer, like a Word document. Normally, you create the file in your software and then "print" it to a PDF printer. This converts the file to PDF format. These PDF files are text-based PDF, meaning that they retain the text and formatting of the original. Text-based PDF files are searchable because they contain real text.
To make these files searchable, it is necessary to "recognize" the text in the image using optical character recognition ("OCR"). This creates text from the "pictures" of the letters and then inserts the text invisibly behind the image. Without OCR, an image-based PDF file is not searchable.
Alternatively, open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat, then select the "Edit" menu > "Select All". This will select all of the text in the file. If nothing is selected, there is no text and the file isn't searchable.
This post demonstrates how to generate searchable PDF documents by extracting text from scanned documents using Amazon Textract. The solution allows you to download relevant documents, search within a document when it is stored offline, or select and copy text.
You can see an example of searchable PDF document that is generated using Amazon Textract from a scanned document. While text is locked in images in the scanned document, you can select, copy, and search text in the searchable PDF document.
To generate a searchable PDF, use Amazon Textract to extract text from documents and add the extracted text as a layer to the image in the PDF document. Amazon Textract detects and analyzes text input documents and returns information about detected items such as pages, words, lines, form data (key-value pairs), tables, and selection elements. It also provides bounding box information, which is an axis-aligned coarse representation of the location of the recognized item on the document page. You can use the detected text and its bounding box information to place text in the PDF page.
PDFDocument is a sample library in AWS Samples GitHub repo and provides the necessary logic to generate a searchable PDF document using Amazon Textract. It also uses open-source Java library Apache PDFBox to create PDF documents, but there are similar PDF processing libraries available in other programming languages.
The following code shows how to take an image document and generate a corresponding searchable PDF document. Extract the text using Amazon Textract and create a searchable PDF by adding the text as a layer with the image.
The following code example takes an input PDF document from an Amazon S3 bucket and generates the corresponding searchable PDF document. You extract text from the PDF document using Amazon Textract, and create a searchable PDF by adding text as a layer with an image for each page.
The build creates a .jar in project-dir/target/searchable-pdf1.0.jar, using information in the pom.xml to do the necessary transforms. This is a standalone .jar (.zip file) that includes all the dependencies. This is your deployment package that you can upload to Lambda to create a function. For more information, see AWS Lambda Deployment Package in Java. DemoLambda has all the necessary code to read S3 events and take action based on the type of input document.
This post showed how to use Amazon Textract to generate searchable PDF documents automatically. You can search across millions of documents to find the relevant file by creating a smart search index using Amazon ES. Searchable PDF documents then allows you to select and copy text and search within a document after downloading it for offline use.
Non-searchable PDF/A files are specialized PDF files that conform to the ISO standards for archiving and long-term preservation of electronic documents. This standard ensures that the document will always be visually correct. When creating PDF/A compliant PDF documents, security options are ignored, LZW compression is not allowed and is replaced with ZIP, and all required font information is embedded into the PDF file. The file is self-contained and includes all information needed to display the file.
One of the steps in a new business proces we are about the automate is the conversion of a non-searchable pdf to a searchable one. Is there a way to do this without the use of any third party application (like Adobe Acrobat Reader DC)? My first gues was to use the OCR activity but this gives back a string, which I cannot export to a PDF. We alreay experimented with Acrobat DC but this is not the finest application to use in combination with UiPath (same issues as already desribed on this forum too).
Note: This topic only applies to non-searchable PDF files, where each page of the PDF is being created as an image. For information on reducing file size with searchable PDF, please see this topic: Reduce Searchable PDF File Size
I couldn't find a "Preview" area, so I'll try this here. I don't know why, but most times I am using Preview to view a PDF document, such as a software manual, the Find function doesn't work correctly. I type in a single word that has numerous visable recurrences, but Preview can't find them. Sometimes, it partially works. I have a MainStage manual I downloaded that only finds instances of the word in the figures of the document, but not in the main text. I keep looking for some selection or preference that is set up wrong, but I have no idea why it works this way. I've had other search problems working with PDF documents on Windows platforms, so maybe it's all related to PDF, and not to Preview. But without a search function, I'd just as well have a paper copy! Any ideas? THANKS!
So I went back to the original website and downloaded the manual. Doing nothing more, that document was actually searchable, and correctly supported copy and paste. Selecting Save As, I saved the document to my desktop (the original was in the Downloads folder), and lo and behold, that version of the document was no longer searchable. So something is going on with the Save As command. When I threw out the non-searchable version, and went back to the Downloads copy and simply moved it to the desktop, that version was still searchable.
So I can't say I fully understand it, but I've learned that I don't want to do Save As after downloading a PDF manual - something in the saving puts the main portion of the document (but not the text in the figures) into a corrupted format that makes it unsearchable.
I was having the same problem - with no search results coming up. Then I clicked on the button in the top left corner (below the red X) and selected Table of Contents, and oddly enough search results started popping up. Weird, I know, but that's what happened. I'm not sure what would happen if there was no table of contents. This file was a textbook that I downloaded. Hope this helps!
Whenever i download a document i intend to work on directly, adding annotations and highlights, etc., i sometimes choose to work on a copy, leaving another untouched (i'm an obsessive academic); sure enough: Preview was not finding text in the *copy* i had made (by clicking "duplicate" in the contextual menu after selecting the pdf in Finder). The original document was perfectly fine; only the duplicate copy is corrupted.
I have the same problem. I can search a PDF document, and Preview will find some occurances of the word, and not others. I tried copy-paste of an occurance that it did not find, and it copy-pastes fine, unlike in your case. I also did not do any "safe as" on the document, it is the original as downloaded from the internet. 2ff7e9595c
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