Editing text

[fletch]

How can I edit text? Existing text. In a document I scanned in. There is NO protection at all on the document. I can select text but can't edit or delete it. The resizable outline appears when I select an area of text, but pressing Del just deletes the outline, the text remains on the page.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi Fletch,

thanks for the post and report.

It is hard to say exactly without seeing the file in question, most likely the text is described as curves and doesn't have the required font information to edit.

If you have an Editor Plus license you can try Enhanced OCR to convert the document to an editable one.

If you want us to take a look upload the PDF here and I will do so.

[fletch]

Looking at the content tab I can see all the words shown on the page. My scanner OCR'd the document when it was scanned. As I move from one word to the next in the Content pane, I see the individual words highlighted on the page. But maybe that doesn't necessarily mean they can be edited/deleted?

I do have Enhanced OCR capability - but if it's already OCR'd, should I be able to edit the OCR'd text? Or is that functionality a next-level ability provided ONLY via Enhanced OCR?

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello fletch,

Thanks for the additional details.
Likely your scanner has added an invisible layer of text over the original scanned image.
So when you look at the contents pane you see the text, and when you click there - the position of that text element on the page gets highlighted, but the text is still technically invisible over the initial scanned image. So you do delete this text, and the image below remains unchanged.
Our Standard OCR works in the same way - it does not alter the initial image and just adds invisible text on top. This is good as you keep the original look of the document, and can still copy text from that file and paste it elsewhere. The limitation is that you can't really update the text in the PDF file itself that way.
So please try to take the initial image and run the Enhanced OCR on that image (selecting one of the options that does replace image pixels with the actual text) - and this will result in a PDF file in which the text is visible and when you edit it - this changes the look of the file as well.

Kind regards,
Stefan

[fletch]

Ok, found it.

OCR pages / More options / Editable Text and Images

Thanks!

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]