adobe acrobat - Edit text in image

07
2014-07
  • Steven Penny

    I have a JPG image with some text in it. I would like to edit this text.

    I am currently using Adobe Acrobat for this purpose, however I found that the Text Recognition Tool will not recognize all text, even clear and obvious text. For example with the following image

    sample

    only the small font is being recognized. Am I missing something or is another program available that can handle this?

    • Answers
  • Tim Radcliffe

    By the sounds of it, you either need to

    1. use better OCR software to extract the text from the image (Image to Text converter for example, or Google Drive/Docs built-in OCR https://support.google.com/drive/answer/176692?hl=en) and manipulate the text outside of the image or

    2. you need to use a graphics editor to manipulate the image as an image, erasing the area showing the existing text and replacing it with new.

    JPG files only maintain information regarding the colour and position of pixels within the image, there is no information held on font or text content or similar. Therefore you cannot change the text within a JPG directly because there is no text within the image, only an image of what the text looked like when it was saved.


    • Related Question

    mac - How to OCR PDF files with Old German Gothic (Fraktur) text?
  • Jason

    I have been successfully using Adobe Acrobat X to OCR many scanned documents which I use for my research. However I have begun studying old German documents which use the Fraktur script, also known as Gothic. SuperUser won't let me post an image of it, but you can find examples of what it looks like in the Wikipedia article (linked above).

    I have read about special programs which OCR the text, such as ABBY FineReader für Fraktur, but first it works on Windows (and I use a Mac), and second I'd like to find a Fraktur plugin for Acrobat to fit into my already-existing workflow. Are there any Fraktur OCR plugins for Acrobat? Generally, where should one look for Acrobat OCR plugins?


    • Related Answers
  • Tyler

    I'm not sure about OCR plugins for Acrobat. However, it looks like ocropus has support for Fraktur text and someone was kind enough to build a OS X version with a simple gui called TakOCR.

    edit: see the Stack Overflow question Fraktur recognition with OCRopus/Tesseract on Linux