OCRing reduces quality of document

[Matthew Kaplan]

I have had a number of instances where OCRing the document distorts the visible text on the document--e.g. makes it fuzzy, changes the spacing.  This is unacceptable.  Any way to fix?  I want the look of the document to stay exactly the same after OCR.  Based on reading posts in this forum I am not the only one having this issue.  I have used Nitro for many years, but I do not recall having this issue until fairly recently.

[Allain Umailin]

Hello @MB1,

Thank you for reaching out to us through our Community Forums!

Before running OCR, kindly go to Advanced and use higher quality settings:

Thanks for choosing Nitro and I hope this helps!

[Matthew Kaplan]

thanks, but I don't understand this response.  I currently have my OCR "quality" selection on this options screen set to "High(slow)".  Are you saying that if I change to medium the appearance of the page will not be altered during the OCR process?  

Also, I assume reducing the setting from high to medium will reduce the OCR quality?

[Allain Umailin]

Hello @MB1,

Thank you for letting me know you are already using High under OCR settings.

In order for me to further assist you with your concern, could you please send me a private message and provide a sample file (with sensitive information extracted) so I can replicate it on my end?

To send me the sample file, hover your mouse on top of my name 'AllainU' and select 'Message'.

Also, what build of Nitro Pro are you working with? You can find this out by clicking on 'About Nitro Pro' under the Help tab (format is 12.X.X.X, e.g. 12.0.0.112) or you can go to Control Panel > Programs and Features.

Thank you very much in advance and I am looking forward to hearing back from you. 

[Matthew Kaplan]

I am using version 12.0.0.108.  I do not have a sample file with non-confidential information that I can send.  More importantly, my concern is what will happen to future documents, not documents already processed.  I think the question is simple and of general interest:  does using the "medium" OCR setting prevent distorting of the page image?  Acrobat has an OCR setting that preserves the visible document image during the OCR process.  Is the "Medium" OCR setting in Nitro analogous?  

I deal with legal documents and need to keep the viewable PDF image exactly the same after OCR.  Based on my own experience and reading other forum posts the image is often not preserved in Nitro. I am trying to understand why and how I can prevent image distortion.

[Allain Umailin]

Hello @MB1,

Thanks for your response and patience,

To further assist you with your concern, I created a support ticket on your behalf.

I will wait for your response through the support case.

Cheers!

[TonyW]

I noticed this behaviour today for the first time. After applying OCR the lines of text in the document became wavy and less clear. In the dialog box shown above I disabled "correct image skew" (turned it off) and that corrected the problem. I now have searchable text and the appearance of the text remains unchanged and appears as in the original scan. . 

My current version of NitroPro is 12.0.108. I noticed this issue of reduced PDF image quality after OCR only in this version, in previous versions there was no change to the quality of the image (trying to unskew it)

[Allain Umailin]

Hello @TonyW,

Thank you for reaching out to us through our Community Forums!

In order for me to further assist you with your concern, could you please send us the sample file (with sensitive information extracted) so I can replicate it on my end.

To send me the sample file, hover your mouse on top of my name 'AllainU' and select 'Message'.

Thank you very much in advance and I am looking forward to hearing back from you. 

[Matthew Kaplan]

The issue is not (or at least not exclusively) with the image skew function.  I had thought that as well, but continued experimentation indicated that that was not the case -- images can be distorted even with the image skew feature is disabled.  And in my interactions with Nitro support they never suggested that deactivating image skew would fix.

Your observation about it not happening with previous versions of Nitro is interesting.  I do not remember this being a problem before, and I have used Nitro for a long time.