The fourth method is a little bit surprising, because it doesn’t start as a digital file at all. In this world of the supposed paperless office, we’re actually using more and more paper than ever before. If and no other reason because we all have printers sitting around and we use them to print documents out and then when we don’t need them, we go ahead and recycle them. However sometimes we do need them, and sometimes we need them to become digital. And Acrobat allows us to go into this other direction by allowing us to convert a piece of paper into a PDF file. Let’s see how that’s done.
First off, I’m going to go ahead and close up this presentation that I have here. And I’m going to bring Acrobat to the fore and I’m going to close up all the PDF files that I have open, just to kind of clean house a little bit so we’ll go ahead and close, tab over to this PDF file, close it. There’s one more PDF file that I have open and close that.
Within the Acrobat, there is a Create PDF task button here, and in the task button, first off I can create from file so that’s something I don’t need to use here, but what I do want to use from here is Create from Scanner. Acrobat can actually talk directly to a scanning device that I have connected to my computer. So I’ll go ahead and select it. And the Acrobat Scan dialogue box comes up and asks me to choose my scanner. Now I only have one scanner. It happens to be an Epson connected to this computer, so I’ll leave that selected. I want to choose a resolution, and a 200 dpi is a pretty good resolution choice for converting documents into PDF files, and I want that much resolution for a specific reason that I’ll discuss in just a moment. But first I want to point out that my output option is to create a new PDF document. If I had left one of those documents open, I could depend to it and add to it through the scanning process. I don’t. I want a brand new PDF so I’m going to go ahead and leave that selected.
When I scan the document, I might want to optimize it a little bit to see if I can compress things using a non-lossy compression just to see if I can get a little bit of a smaller file here. And then last but not the least, the reason that I want to have specific amount of resolution in the document is because through the scanning process, Acrobat will allow me to make the text searchable. Now when you scan a document, all you’re doing is creating picture of it. There aren’t actually any words there, and yes a human can look at the words and read them, but a computer certainly can’t, meaning that Acrobat can’t search the document to find a particular phrase or word that you might be looking for. Unless you select Make Searchable which means Acrobat will run OCR technology on the document to take the picture of words and convert them into actual digital words. And you’ll see that process in just a moment.
Now the other thing that I want to do here is choose Make Accessible because a document that I have converted to make it searchable by scanning it in, is also a document that I can make so that someone who can’t actually see the document can observe it. What I mean by that is the Americans with Disabilities Act states that if you create a digital document, it has to be accessible to people whether they can read the document with their eyes or not. Someone who’s visually impaired might have a screen reading device to read the document aloud to them. If you make the text searchable in the document using the OCR technology, and you select Make Accessible, then the screen reading technology that they can use will be able to read the document and everything should be in about the right order, and be spoken correctly so that they can actually observe the document without having to be able to see it. It’s a good thing to do, and in some cases, it’s required of the documents that you have and so since I can do it, I’m going to go ahead and leave Make Accessible and Make Searchable selected so that I can have the most usable document possible from this process.
When I’m done choosing my settings, I’ll go ahead and click Scan. Acrobat will ask me where to save it, and again, I’ll put this on to the Desktop so that I can very quickly and easily find it if I need to. I’ll name the document in this case, since the document happens to be a memo, and it’s sitting on my scanner right now, I’ll click Save and Acrobat will take over from here.
Once the scan is complete, Acrobat wants to know if I want to do this some more so if I have a multipage memo, I can choose to scan more pages by just putting in sheet two and continuing. In this case, it’s a single-paged memo so the scanning is complete, I’ll just click OK. And then Acrobat takes the final step which is to run the OCR technology on the document. Now it’s hard to tell that anything interesting is happening to the document. Yes, I have an exact replica of what I put in the scanner, complete with the signature, the logo and all the pieces of the document that I care about, plus the fact that it was skewed, but that’s another story. However, to prove that I actually have created a document that’s searchable, I’m going to search on it. So I’ll take my zoom tool and I’ll zoom in on a word, in this case, the word “ozone”. I’ll go up to the search field and type the word “ozone” and then hit the Enter key, and lo and behold, it found the word “ozone” and it found it in the correct location.
So this document started its life as who knows, some sort of digital document. Somebody printed it and then gave me the paper. I’m able to reclaim that piece of paper and add it back to my digital workflow through Acrobat. That’s pretty significant because that means I can cross that paper to digital divide, something that I actually find myself having to do frequently.
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