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Adobe Scan app

Posted by Allan Wilson on the 6th June, 2017

The day after last week's blog on Scanning Pens and Scanning Apps, which suggested that the Adobe Scan app for the iPad only produced "image" files, rather than "selectable" text, when it is used to scan a page with text, Adobe released a new version of the app which DOES produce text. Sometimes, you just can't win!

We suggest turning Auto Capture Off.The free Adobe Scan app opens in "auto capture" mode, which means that it tries to automatically scan anything in sight. If you're not careful, you can end up with several scanned images before you have even started. I would suggest turning this off by means of the icon above the 'take picture' button, unless you are going to be working in an environment where you want to take lots of scans.

When you take an image of of a piece of text, you'll be given a chance to crop the image to remove any distracting background surrounding the text and can then save it as a PDF, either locally, or to the Adobe Cloud. The app carries out an optical character recognition (OCR) process as part of the saving procedure - note that this typically takes a few seconds. When this has finished, you will be able to open the document in Adobe Acrobat Reader or in another app.

Recognising text can take some time. Once recognising is complete, the scan can be opened in Adobe Acrobat Reader 

Unfortunately, although the image has been converted to text when it is opened in Adobe Acrobat Reader, the option to use Speak Selection to read the text out loud seems to have been disabled for some reason. If you want to be able to have the text spoken, you have to open it in another app, such as ClaroPDF or Voice Dream Reader.There is no option to Speak Selected Text.

In summary, although it is good that Adobe Scan can convert an image of text into readable text, there are better apps to use, e.g. Claro ScanPen Reader, Office Lens or Scanbot Pro.

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