Acrobat 6.0 does OCR quickly and effectively

Adobe has always called the OCR function in Acrobat "paper capture." And in previous versions of Acrobat this has been a weak function. For example, in Acrobat 5.0 you had to download a plug-in to do Paper Capture, and even then you could only OCR 50 pages at a time. And, if you did, you'd learn that the process was slow. I guess the idea was that if you wanted to do serious OCR you'd pay Adobe for the high-end Paper Capture product that they sell.

Well, I'm here to report that Acrobat Standard 6.0 does a great job with OCR/Paper Capture. I just OCR'd a 100 page deposition transcript (which was very good quality text) and Acrobat did the entire conversion process in about 4 minutes. I timed it at one point and it was converting pages at about a 20ppm rate, so it might actually have taken less time.

I have noted that this new version of Acrobat also converts TIFF files to PDF much quicker. So, despite my initial dissatisfaction with the radically revamped interface, I have to say this new version has some real power where it counts.

Update: I OCR'd a 600 page batch of documents, many of which were not very clean copies (i.e. the sort of documents that make OCR engines choke and sputter). I knew it would take longer than 20 ppm (and it did) so I set it to do the work as I was leaving for the day. When I returned it had hung up midway through, but it wasn't a big deal. I clicked the dialogue box that basically said "ignore this error in the future and keep working no matter what." It hummed along quite briskly and finished the task in about a half hour. The resulting file size was about 87 MBs, but I ran a "Save As" and it compressed down to 26 MBs. Very nice.