W
Wayne Fulton
"PDF is not designed to be able to get your data out of a PDF file for a
second try (at least Acrobat is not)."
So it seems you're saying that while Omnipage Pro can open a pdf file
and resave it at a smaller size, Adobe does not have this ability.
I just called both companies and their answers seem to confirm what you
said. Omnipage customer service told me I could open and re-save the
existing pdf at a smaller size. Adobe customer service wasn't sure and
they are getting back to me.
What they say should be interesting. Acrobat has a Paper Capture menu
that does OCR on the file contents and generates text characters
internally. There isnt any control, it simply does what it does. This
allows text searches on words in the document when it was originally an
image, and the file gets smaller.
Acrobats internal OCR wants 300 dpi too. I compared files containing a
300 dpi scan and a 200 dpi scan of the same page, and the 300 dpi image
followed by Capture (double size originally) was less than half (nearly
1/3) the final PDF file size of the same 200 dpi image followed by
Capture, because the 200 dpi OCR did very poorly, and mostly remained as
image.
But what I meant is that Acrobat provides no way to get to get your text
or your images back out of PDF. It isnt that it cant be done, Acrobat
just doesnt do it. I believe the thinking must be that we probably
created the PDF by printing our text source document to PDF in the first
place, so we can just use that original source document for other
purposes, and discard the unwanted PDF copy. The images in the PDF are
probably JPG anyway, and the source document probably wasnt.
People do use PDF to archive documents, and they can always be viewed or
printed, but Acrobat wont otherwise give back the actual text or images
(if you wanted to do something different with it now). I think that
not many understand that limitation.