WORKING WITH PDFS
What are PDF types? Image only use for images! File types include TIFF, JPG, JPEG. Use TIFF for printing, JPG or JPEG for web, online or digital-only use. High Quality Print use for things that will be printed. Image + text scan the PDF and apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Images are kept as images but text is converted to real digital text that is searchable and can read by screen readers. Use for readings, text-based documents, forms, anything going into student course packs or required reading for employees such as policies. Archival and accessibility standards for libraries and archives PDF/A, PDF/X, PDF/E & PDF/UA types of image + text PDFs that meet various library and archive archival/research material standards. PDF/UA maximizes accessibility of a PDF.
Why Accessible PDFs? Accessibility involves two key issues: How users with disabilities access electronic information How electronic information creators and developers enable web pages, PDFs, documents, and software to function for individuals with disabilities and work with assistive devices and technology used by individuals with disabilities. Why worry about accessibility? It s the right thing to do. It s the law for educational institutions and employers.
PDFs and Xerox Multi-Function Devices Log in to the Xerox MFD printer/copier/scanner. Select Network Scanning. Many academic department Xerox s are set to do OCR scanning by default. To choose OCR scanning, the tab Network Scanning opens by default. Tap the tab Filing Options. Select File Format. Select PDF then PDF again then tap the Searchable Text button then the green check mark for Searchable Text. Last select the language the document is in and tap Save. Next tap the tab Advanced Settings. Select Resolution. Select for Resolution at least 400 DPI for a high quality OCR PDF.
Check if PDFs are OCR or Not To check for an OCR PDF for Acrobat Reader: Search for Characters that Appear on the Page. Non-OCR PDFs will not have characters. Use the find command in Acrobat to search for text that appears on the page. Select Edit > Find and in the search filed type a term that appears on the page. If the document was scanned, Acrobat will not find the search item but will display the message: Acrobat has finished searching the document. No matches were found. For long documents check for tags. To do so in the Acrobat menu go to File > Properties. Look for the Tagged PDF label in the lower left hand corner of the Description tab. If it says No there are no tags.
Check if PDFs are OCR or Not To check accessibility for a PDF with Adobe Acrobat X Pro: First reveal the Accessibility Tool pane. If it is not already displayed, select View > Tools > Accessibility from the Adobe Acrobat X Pro menu. The keyboard method is Alt+V+ T + A. With the Accessibility Tool Pane revealed, select the Quick Check panel. The keyboard shortcut is Shift + Ctrl + 6 to check immediately without having to view and use the Accessibility Tool pane.
Check if PDFs are OCR or Not An image-only PDF will produce the following result:
Check if PDFs are OCR or Not Quick Check Results The Quick Check will generate one of the following messages when reporting results: This document has logical structure but it is not a Tagged PDF. This document is not structured, so the reading order may not be correct. Try different reading orders using the Reading Preferences panel. No accessibility problems were detected in this quick check. This document s security settings prevent access by screen readers.
Convert Image PDFS to Image + Text To use OCR to convert image-only PDFs one at a time to image + text, use Adobe Acrobat Pro > Tools > Recognize Text > In This File. To use OCR to convert image-only PDFs in a batch process, use Adobe Acrobat Pro > Tools > Recognize Text > In Multiple Files > Add Files > Add Folders then browse to the folder that contains a set of PDF files to convert. Edit the conversion settings if you need to convert from a language other than English. To convert PDFs one at a time and edit for accessibility adding content such as Tags and/or Alternate Text for images/figures, use Adobe Acrobat Pro > Tools > Action Wizard > Create Accessible PDFs. Some documents cannot be converted if they were poorly scanned or scanned at low resolution. These documents must be rescanned using the OCR process. You may need to use specialty software to produce OCR scans of documents containing equations or musical notation. Contact the IT Help Desk if you have problems or questions about scanning material with equations, musical notations.
Use Acrobat Pro Batch Processing Acrobat Pro has some powerful batch processing options. You can put a set of PDFs in a folder and check all the PDFs in that folder for OCR. Once you identify a set of PDFs that need conversion with OCR to text + image PDFs, you can apply the conversion to the whole folder of PDFs rather than converting one at a time. We will post options/instructions shortly for using batch processing to check PDFs. See the previous slide for the batch processing instructions for OCR of a set of PDFs in a folder. If you are already using batch processing we may ask you for comments on your process so it can be used to help others.
PDF Online Resources ftp://ftp.scansoft.com/products/pdfconverter/whitepapers/ WP_WhatisPDF.pdf http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/reader.html http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/ http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/resources.html