There are two types of PDF files. One type is a scanned image of a document, simply a picture of it, if you will. You can read the text when viewing it, but the computer can't. The other type contains text that is readable by the computer. These kinds of files are typically created from text files, such as a Word document, rather than scanned. In this case, the text is captured along with the image.
If you're viewing a PDF file such as a court document, and don't know which kind of file it is, use the find feature to locate a word that you know is there to see if Adobe Acrobat can recognize it. If not, you're looking at an image.
What if you have an image-only file and need to search the document, or otherwise want the computer to recognize the text contained in the image? Perhaps you'd like to extract the citations using Checkcite or Westcheck. In order to do that, you need to OCR the document. Lucky for you Dave Fishel has written two tutorials to help you out, OCR Tutorial for Acrobat 4 and 5 and OCR Tutorial for Acrobat 6. I'm sure glad PDF for Lawyers is back!
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