Identifying Raster and Vector Documents

Running Optical Character Recognition


There are a few additional options available to you via check boxes. You have the option to:
- Correct Skew, which allows Revu to correct any angular deviations in the text.
Detect Orientation, which allows Revu to detect and correct the page orientation if needed.
Detect Text in Pictures and Drawings, which allows Revu to scan any text in graphics or pictures.
Skip Vector Pages, which allows Revu to skip pages with vector content – as these pages will not need to be adjusted. This will speed up the overall process.
Page Chunk Size, which allows you to determine the maximum number of pages processed through OCR at one time. Increasing this may increase the speed of the process, but take more of your computer’s power. Generally, 1 is the recommended setting for Page Chunk.
- Max Vector Size, which allows you to set the maximum vector size that will be analyzed during the OCR process. Decreasing this may increase the speed of the process, but also may cause OCR to ignore larger font sizes.

Once you have adjusted the settings, press OK to run Optical Character Recognition.

Once OCR has completed, the text on the document will be selectable and searchable. I can double check that everything ran as it should have by grabbing the Select Text tool and trying to select the text once again.

As you can see, the text is now selectable. Now, you can now perform text edits using the Edit PDF Content tool, or run searches using the Search panel.

Summary
In conclusion, Bluebeam Revu’s Optical Character Recognition is a valuable tool for working with scanned documents. If you need to work with text in a raster document, OCR will convert pixels into editable text content. Once run, you can work with your scanned document’s text as if it were a raster document. This allows you to perform both edits and searches on the PDF. If you’re using an older version of Revu, OCR is only available in Bluebeam Revu eXtreme. However, the tool is available within all Bluebeam Revu 21 license types. If you know that you will need to handle raster PDFs quite often, you may want to look into purchasing one of these Revu versions.
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please use the comment section on the bottom of this page, and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog to get more Bluebeam tips & tricks directly in your inbox!
Lauren Hecker is a Bluebeam Certified Instructor and teaches Onsite Bluebeam Certified Courses, virtual Bluebeam Basics and Advanced courses, and custom onsite or virtual courses. To see her next open enrollment course, please visit our calendar. To schedule an onsite or custom course, please contact us!
If the OCR scan is missing smaller font sizes, do I reduce the Max Vector Size or Increase it?
Hi Ore,
Try increasing Max Vector Size to its highest setting. This may not fix your issue, but it will ensure that none of the fonts are determined “too big” for OCR to search through.
Let me know if that helps!