One last place from which I can create a PDF file that we are going to discuss here is, from a Scanner. Not a lot of people know that you can do this, but it's really, really useful. If you have a particular piece of paper that you need to add to this mix, you can do so digitally by, first off, having Acrobat convert that piece of paper to a PDF file. So we are going to go ahead and take that step now.
Adobe Acrobat can convert any image file type or almost any image file type to an Adobe PDF file by choosing Create PDF from File and you can point it out. So if you have a scanner that can produce TIFF files, you can turn them into PDF files by simply having Acrobat open them. But you know what, you can actually drive your scanner right from within Acrobat and that can be very convenient if you've got some paper you need to add to this project and you need to do so quickly, but you also can take advantage of some settings that we want to pay attention to here.
So first off, the process starts by simply choosing your scanner. If you have a variety of scanners connected to your computer, you are unusual, but if you do, you can choose from among them.
In this case, I have this scanner here and I am going to go ahead and choose it. If your scanner happens to be a duplexing scanner, you can actually choose to have it scan both sides of a document or scan the front sides of a document. What that will really do is it will determine, whether or not, you are going to scan all the odd pages and then add the even pages later on. Frankly, most of this work is going to be handled by the Scanner Software and it will be overridden by the Scanner Software. So I generally leave it on front sides.
And then if I have a document open that I want to append to, I can. In this case, I am actually going to create a unique document. So I want to select New Document as my destination. Now, this is really handy. Adobe Acrobat can take a scan of text and convert it to actual digital text, and you can have that happen at scan time to save yourself a step. So I am going to go ahead and click the Settings button here and talk about the settings that I am going to choose to make that happen.
First off, what kind of PDF output do I want? In this case I am going to choose Searchable Image and what that's going to give me is a document that leaves the scan exactly in place. So if there is any logos or handwriting or anything on the document that can't be converted using the OCR functionality, it's going to leave it alone, in fact, the whole image is going to look exactly like it did coming off the scanner, and in a legal situation that might be necessary. But at the end of the process I don't need quite as much resolution as I am going to recommend that you use for the scan. When I recommend the resolution that's used for the scan that so that the OCR process will be successful. After that I don't need it to have quite so much resolution. So in this case I am going to choose the Medium Resolution option and what that means is that it's going to make the file a little bit smaller. Yet it's still going to look pretty good on your average laser printer, I am going to say OK to that. And then I am going to add text to the document, I talked about accessibility and tagging in Microsoft Word. Again it doesn't really hurt anything, it's not a bad thing to do, and it has a variety of benefits including the ability to make the document accessible for someone who needs to have a Screen Reader read the document to them. But it will also make it easier if you want to save the document's text out and reuse it later on and since we are going to cover that I am going to differ that till then. So definitely want to turn that on.
And then last but not least your Image Settings. In your Image Settings dialog box you can apply compression to the image file that sits on top of the text that we are going to create, and it's not a bad idea to do that, however, remember if it's a legal document and you need to be able to state without any ambiguity at all that the document looks exactly like what was scanned then it's a good idea to turn the Compression off.
Now the Monochrome Compression isn't something that you are going to worry about for reasons that I will talk about a little bit later on in another lesson I am going to choose the CCITT Group 4. And then you can leave this slider alone if you decide that you are going turn the Compression off leave this slider alone. If you are going to turn some compression and you choose Adaptive or JPEG and really you can choose whichever one you like then you can move the slider back and forth between quality and size.
Now the rest of the stuff here just gives you some real fine tuning that you can apply to a document coming off a scanner to try and get it to look as good as possible. For example you can deskew it, so if you lay the document on the scanner but a little bit skewed it will deskew it. My recommendation is not to lay it on the scanner but skewed in the first place and then just leave these things at their default, they won't have an affect on the document if you get a good scan. So I am going to say OK, and now we are going to go ahead and scan the document. In this case Acrobat is actually going to talk directly to the scanner's driver software which is installed on the system. Before I make the scan I do want to make a couple of settings. First off, I want to handle the resolution issue, and in this case I am going to recommend at least 200 dpi of resolution, in fact I am going to go all the way up to 300 dpi.
Now we don't need color. So I am going to choose Grayscale, I am not going to choose black and white picture or text because it makes just a little bit easier for the OCR process to do its work. And also should feel free to take advantage of the various scanner options that can make the image look better. So if I have got a scan that's kind of washed out or a piece of paper where the text is light, I might want to go ahead and add a little contrast just to kind of make it easier for the OCR software to detect what letters are what.
Once I have done that, I am just going to select OK, preview this scanner bed just to make sure that I am only scanning that what I need. I don't need the entire scanner bed. And then I can go ahead and set a crop area on the scanner, again this is all just sort of scanner stuff. Click on Scan and Acrobat will go ahead, tell the scanner to do its job.
The scanner will hand the data back to Acrobat and then it will produce a PDF file for me. Once it's completed the scan Acrobat is smart enough to realize that I might be scanning a multiple page document. So in this case here I might have sheet 2. I don't have another page for this particular scan, but if I did I just simply lay it in the scanner bed and click Scan because I have already set up my settings, I can just have Acrobat kind of keep going, so just keep clicking next, next, next until I hit done and then Acrobat will produce the PDF file and open it for me so that I can see the results.
Now Acrobat has gone ahead, it's created the scan. So I am just going to zoom out so that we can see it, and I am going to take the Select Tool here, I am going to drag-select and you will see that even though this text came from a piece of paper the text is actually there. And another way to proof that is to choose Ctrl+F or Command+F on the Macintosh to bring up the Find function. And I am going to look for the word inch because I can see that it's in there, hit Return and there it is, it found the word inches in context.
So the text that it created from the OCR even though it left the paper in place it sort of buried that text in behind the letters that the text came from. So it's a very, very handy way to create a document that's usable. So I have gone all the way from a single piece of paper to a PDF file, but I can then add to my project and that piece of paper is now something that's a digital file that's searchable. So it's a very handy way to create PDF.
And last but not least from the Create PDF Menu I have an option here that I actually use fairly frequently in th
