How to Turn off Auto OCR? Here’s a Step-by-Step Guide

This post offers an introduction to OCR, including its functions and benefits. Based on that, it explains why you need to turn off automatic OCR in PDF and the detailed steps for OCR PDF.

About OCR

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that converts an image of text into a machine-readable text format. In other words, OCR can convert an image into a text format with its contents stored as text data. If you want to edit, search, or count the words in the image, you should OCR the image first.

If you need to efficiently manage invoices, scanned legal documents, printed contracts, and items like that, it’s highly recommended to use a piece of OCR software. MiniTool PDF Editor is one of the best OCR software, allowing you to convert a PDF to scanned or searchable copies and convert scanned copies to editable PDFs. It can also convert scanned PDF to Word, Excel, PPT, and other supported file formats.

MiniTool PDF EditorClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

The OCR feature is enabled by default. Every time you open a scanned PDF or an image-based PDF, you will be prompted with the message “Apply OCR to edit the current scanned PDF”. You can click Apply OCR to confirm the operation or click “Don’t Show for This File” or “Don’t Show Again” to dismiss the message.

Why Need to Turn off Automatic OCR in PDF

Though OCR brings many benefits, sometimes you may want to switch off automatic OCR. Why you need to turn off automatic OCR in PDF? Common reasons are summarized as follows.

• Unnecessary processing: If most content of the PDF file is text, there’s no necessity to perform OCR. You can perform OCR to suitable PDF files.
• Performance optimization: Auto OCR can be time and resource-intensive while processing large volumes of documents or images. You can disable it to boost system performance and improve efficiency.
• Cost efficiency: Some OCR services are cloud-based and charge based on usage. So, you’d better turn off automatic OCR in PDF to reduce cost.
• Privacy and security: To avoid sensitive or confidential information from being extracted, you should switch off automatic OCR in PDF.
• Avoid errors: Auto OCR sometimes can misinterpret non-text elements, resulting in errors. You can avoid these errors by turning off auto OCR.

Here comes the question: how to turn off auto OCR? If you are looking for the answer, read the content below now! It offers you detailed steps.

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How to Turn off Auto OCR

Here, I will tell you how to turn off auto OCR in Adobe Acrobat. The process varies depending on the specific version. According to your version, follow the corresponding steps.

Steps for the Latest Version

Step 1: Run Adobe Acrobat on your computer.

Step 2: Open the scanned PDF in the program.

Step 3: Click on Tools > Edit PDF.

Step 4: On the right pane, untick the Recognize text checkbox.

Steps for Acrobat 9 & 10

Step 1: Choose Create > PDF from Scanner > Configure Presets.

Step 2: In the Configure Presets window, uncheck the Make Searchable (Run OCR) checkbox.

Step 3: Finally, click OK to save changes.

Further reading:

Adobe Acrobat is a well-known PDF editor, boasting dozens of features. For instance, it helps you edit, view, convert, annotate, combine, split, compress PDFs. In addition, it can be used to edit text in PDFs, clear grid lines in PDF, fill PDF forms, and more. However, it sometimes can prompt you errors like a number is out of range PDF, an incorrect structure was found in the PDF, etc.

In cases like that, try using an alternative to Adobe Acrobat like MiniTool PDF Editor. It also helps you perform various tasks related to PDFs.

MiniTool PDF EditorClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

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Bottom Line

This post has told you why and how to turn off auto OCR in detail. If you want to switch off automatic OCR, refer to the given steps in the post.