PDF for Lawyers

OCR factoid (it's good for rotating docs too).

Many people know that running OCR on your PDFs will make them text searchable (if the PDF was created by a scan as opposed to 'printing to PDF,' in which case they are searchable as a matter of course). And man people know that running OCR takes a bit of time—as much as 10 secs per page, depending on the quality of the scanned pages. In fact, because of the time issue a lot of people don't run OCR on most of their documents.

I'm one of those people. 

However, I do run OCR on case documents. That is, I do it for all of the documents that are produced in litigation, or which I produce. These kinds of documents are the ones you really want to be able to search. But even if you're not interested in searching your case documents you should probably still take the time to run OCR.

Why?

Well, most documents that I've seen produced to me contained a lot of mis-rotated pages. After I scan the documents in I want them to be rotated in the proper direction. If they're sideways then I want them rotated by 90°, and if they're upside down then they should be rotated 180°. I could go through and manually rotate the pages, but if the document set has a lot of pages this would be boring and I'd probably make mistakes.

If I run OCR, however, the rotation will be done for me automatically. That's because in order to do the OCR the software has to have all the text oriented properly. So the first thing it does, as part of its processing, is examine to see if the page is properly oriented. If not, it fixes the orientation automatically.

Even if the page is 'properly oriented' the OCR function will also help out in the case of pages that are still a little skewed to one side. So, OCR is not only great for make documents text searchable. It's also great for cleaning up a document set and making it look better.

Conniving politicians use PDFs to deceive us!

According to this news source, Rush Limbaugh recently accused the Democrats of "reformatting" the economic stimulus bill into a PDF, thereby thwarting the his effort to search the bill's text.  

I seriously doubt that the bill was published in non-searchable PDF format, but even it it had been the he could have easily solved his problem by making the bill searchable. I know he'd rather take the opportunity to blast democrats than to solve a small technical hurdle.  Just for the record: I'm not offended by Limbaugh's accusations about the Democrats, but I'd prefer he not disparage the good name of PDFs in the process.

Mobile scanning

Fujitsu has dominated the scanning market in recent years, primarily with the introduction of its very popular ScanSnap model. The latest ScanSnap version is the S510 (for Windows users), or the S510m (for Mac users). The S510 models come bundled with Adobe Acrobat software valued at about $200. The S510 has a small footprint, is lightweight, and costs about $400.

However, it's not something that you are likely to toss in your backpack or briefcase. But, you say, why would I want to take my scanner with me? Good question.

You might want to take a scanner with you if you were going to a deposition and you knew that from time to time documents might be offered as exhibits. If you had a scanner you could quickly scan the documents instead of having to bring them back to your office to scan later. If you use PDFs a lot then you'd probably also appreciate having the ability to immediately start annotating deposition exhibits.

Another example of where you might want to use a mobile scanner is if you go to court to look at records. In the local state court where I often find myself it costs one dollar per page to copy records. More than that, though, it's a huge pain in the ass to have documents copied. It involves a lot of standing around in line and waiting. If I had a scanner I could quickly scan the documents I needed, without having to pay an exorbitant fee or wait an inordinate amount of time.

That's where the mobile scanner by Fujitsu would come in handy. The Fujitsu model S300 (available in a Mac version called the S300m) is available for $260 at Amazon.  It has an automatic document feeder that holds 10 pages, and scans at a rate of about 10 pages per minute. Granted, this is not very fast, but certainly fast enough for any kind of mobile scanning that you're likely to do. The scanner will do duplex scanning, and will scan in color. The best thing about it, however, is that it does not need a separate power supply. It takes up its power from the USB port of your computer, which can be a laptop.

If you have this notion that scanners are hard to configure and use then you might be thinking about the wrong kind of scanner.  The Fujitsu models are dead-simple to set up and operate.  Check them out if you want to lessen your frustrating reliance on paper.  I'm going to order one of the mobile models (already have two S510s) so that next time I have to go to court I won't waste money. If I scan 260 pages of records the scanner will have paid for itself.  And, I'm sure it will take me less than half the time it takes the court employees to make copies (which of course I only need so that I can take them back to my office to scan them!).

Scanning & OCR

Rick Borstein, who runs the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog, has a great article on scanning and OCR with Acrobat 8.  The article appears at the equally wonderful LLRX.com site (run by Sabrina Pacifici).  Rick is extremely knowledgeable and his article is a must-read if you are interested in scanning.

OCR problems in Acrobat 8?

For some reason, I have run into a problem when doing OCR on my documents in Acrobat 8.  I don't think that it's an inherent problem with Acrobat 8 (Mac version) because I've been able to do OCR many times before without any problem.  I think somehow I've engaged a preference setting or changed something inadvertently.

Here's what happens.  When I run OCR everything proceeds normally until I look at the resulting file.  For some reason, the margins of the original document have been shrunk to the point that text along the bottom (e.g. the page numbering and the last line of text) have disappeared.  Obviously, this is not acceptable.

I plan to email the folks at Adobe to find out how to troubleshoot this problem, and when I have an answer to the problem I'll report back.   Meanwhile, if anyone else has experienced this problem, or if anyone has a solution please leave a comment.

OCR, PDFs, and bates-numbered documents

Optical Character Recognition (or 'OCR') is a great tool.  As most of you know, when you have a scanned file it's basically just an image.  Even though the image may be a document that contains words the computer regards those words as pixels that it displays.  A word-processing file, by contrast, is an assemblage of characters that the computer can recognize as such, which is why you can word search a text-based document but not an scanned image.  Unless, you OCR the image file.

When you tell the computer to do OCR you are asking it to do something very sophisticated.  The computer has to analyze each assemblage of pixels to determine what character that assemblage might be.  The cleaner the pixels the better chance the computer will guess right when it decides what character it is.

Adobe Acrobat has long had an OCR function, but in prior versions it was called "paper capture."  Acrobat 6.0 was the first version that, to my mind, handled OCR reliably.  Acrobat 7.0 does an even better job, although it introduces other quirks in other areas that I'm not crazy about.  In any event, the OCR/Paper Capture function is a great tool in Acrobat because it keeps the image file intact but identifies the characters in the image file so that you can search across a document set for key words.  Obviously, this is a nice tool for litigators who deal with document productions.  And, so even though it takes a fair amount of time to OCR a document (approximately 15 seconds per page, more or less), it's often worthwhile.  Which brings me to reader mail.

Today I got a great question from a reader about a problem he had when he ran the OCR function in Acrobat 6.0:

One question regarding the OCR function – have you come across the problem where part of a scanned page had “renderable text” but the remainder does not?  Apparently Acrobat 6.0 decides that it cannot OCR the remainder of the page, a dialog box appears acknowledging the problem, and you either cancel the OCR or move on to the next page.

This seems to have happened to me in one production where the Bates ranges are text, but the rest of the page is scanned.  I’d assume this is because the documents were scanned and then some program like Easy Bates or something similar applied a Bates range to the PDF.

Any thoughts?

I have indeed had problems OCR'ing documents once I did something to them (like bates-stamping the documents electronically).  In other words, OCR works best if done right after you've scanned them.  And of course, as I said before, it works best on clean copies (i.e. fax copies are usually not going to give you good results).   So, if you intend to OCR your PDF documents then it's best to do that first, and then apply the bates-stamp.  Of course, if any of you readers out there have other observations please share them in the comments section.  Thanks.

The perfect scanner - more thoughts

At LegalTech there was a lot of information about great scanners.  One scanner that I was excited about was the Fujitsu ScanSnap, which is supposed to go for about $500 bundled with Acrobat Standard 7.0.  It's got a small footprint and supposedly scans at about 15 pages per minute.  I heard that there getting drivers for the Mac is dicey, but the Fujitsu rep told me they would be out by September or so. 

I was thinking the Fujitsu would be a good scanner to recommend (and it may well be) but then a knowledgeable tech consultant told me about The Xerox Documate 252.  Actually, he raved about it.  The Xerox 252 is a TWAIN-compliant sheet fed scanner with a USB 2.0 connection.  It can handle 25 pages per minute, or 50 in duplex mode (i.e. scanning both sides of a double-sided document).  It's going for about $850 at Amazon.com right now, and there is a great review on the product page from someone who raves that this scanner "changed his life."  According to the reviewer the scanner works well with both Macs and PCs.

Seeking the Perfect Scanner

Link: Seeking the Perfect Scanner.

Some of the most-asked questions here at PDF for Lawyers involve scanning paper documents. PDFzone has an interesting article on one fellow's search for a sheet-fed duplex (i.e., it scans two-sided documents) scanner that will capture images directly to PDF.  Also included in the article is a link to another article about software that scans directly to PDF.

~~ Dave

Paper Capture quirk

I typically run 'paper capture' (i.e. OCR, or 'optical character recognition') on documents that I have scanned in as PDF files. The point of running the Paper Capture is to make the text in the document searchable and indexable. Lately, I've been getting complaints from people that I send my PDF files to that they can't open them. I think I know what the problem is, and it's related to the Paper Capture function.

First of all I have Adobe 6.0 running on a Windows machine and that's what I use to do the Paper Capture on. I think that running the Paper Capture is making the file unreadable to people who only have the Adobe Reader program. The solution is to run function called 'Reduce File Size' (Menu/File/Reduce File Size) and choose compatibility with Acrobat 4.0 and higher. This seems to render the file viewable by people using the simple Adobe Reader Program.

Obviously, the whole point of using PDF files is that people should be able to view them easily. Maybe this problem is unique to my computer but somehow I think not. So, if you run 'Paper Capture' it is a good idea to run the 'Reduce File Size' operation immediately after you do that and save that file as your final version.

OCR Tutorial for Acrobat 4 and 5

The process for doing Optical Character Recognition using Acrobat 4 or 5 is similar to that outlined in the previous post on Acrobat 6. You open and convert an image file, and run the "Paper Capture" tool on it.

The most significant difference in the earlier versions is that, until Acrobat 6, you could only OCR 50 pages at a time. That limitation really hinders the usefulness of the earlier versions, and although you can work around it, it's a pain. Nevertheless, here are the steps. They are virtually identical for Mac and PC. I'll use the TIFF file example again.

In Acrobat, go to the File menu and choose Import. . .
In the dialog box, select your TIFF file and click OK. That will turn your TIFF image into a PDF image. You still need Acrobat to "read" it and convert the pictures of letters into actual text letters.
Go to Tools > Paper Capture > Capture Pages. This will give you a couple of choices. The PDF Output Style you want is "Original Image with Hidden Text." Click OK and you can select which pages to OCR (all, current, or a page range). Click OK again, and the OCR engine fires up. Go make tea. (Although, since you're doing a maximum of 50 pages, this won't take all that long.)

Don't forget to do FIle > Save. You now have a word-searchable document.

Here is a quick war story/workaround for the old 50 page limit. With the advent of Acrobat 6, I can't think of any reason why an attorney that has the need to OCR even a handful of scanned documents shouldn't upgrade. I actually used this method, but I wasn't billing anybody by the hour. . . and there weren't any alternatives ready to hand. I also did it on a Mac, so I managed to use AppleScript to automate some of it. (Which is the full extent of my programming ability.) I have no idea how you would do it on a PC. If you have the ability to automate this on a PC, get a quick programming moonlighting job and use the money to upgrade to Acrobat 6 or one of the other commercial programs...

If you have a big TIFF file you need to convert, get one of the excellent shareware image-handling programs that will allow you select 50 pages/images at a time, and split the big file into smaller ones. Create as many 50-page files as it takes. Open, convert, and OCR all of those files (that's where AppleScript comes in handy). Name them something like File 1, FIle 2 etc. or you're going to get mightily confused. Run the Batch Process that creates thumbnails for all of the files. Now, open File 1 in Acrobat, open the thumbnail pane and pull it all the way across the screen so you only see thumbnails. Navigate to last page. Use the various "add pages" or "append pages" commands to stick the next 50 pages into your PDF. Rinse and repeat as necessary. Save, and voila! You've got a great big OCR'd PDF.

Now that I look at this kludge, it makes me want to weep . . . (however, one does what one can with the available tools). There is really no longer any good reason to go to those lengths because Acrobat 6 and other PDF creation and OCR tools are widely available.

Hope this helps those who are still using the older versions.

-- Dave