From a picture to a font — OCR in Acrobat 9

Ever been handed a piece of paper by a client and told, "This is all I have, but I want you to recreate this." If it's a business card, that's not a big deal. There's not much time involved in re-typesetting someone's phone number. But what if it's several pages of type? Or a manuscript? Or a file of scanned images that a client then wants to make type changes to?

Acrobat (not Reader, but the full version) has a great feature to help out with this problem, OCR. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and it can convert an image of text and turn it into searchable, real, vector text. Acrobat has had an OCR feature for many versions now, but we are going to be looking at the features in Acrobat 9's OCR. You can use the OCR feature as you are scanning the document, or if you already have an image, you can apply OCR to it.

I am going to assume you have an image file already and want the text in the image to actually be text, and not a picture. First, launch Acrobat 9. (Mac or PC, of course!) Then go to File < Create PDF < From File. Select your image file, hit okay. When it comes up, you have a pdf file all ready to go.

(A note: Adobe recommends that your compression options in converting a tif to a pdf should be changed to a lossless compression format before converting Tiffs to a pdf format. Go to Edit < Preferences < Convert to PDF, select tiff, click on Edit settings and change the compression to ZIP or for Monochrome, change to JBIG2(lossless) or CCITT G4.)

Then, go to Document < OCR Text Recognition < Recognize Text Using OCR.

When that menu pops up, choose all pages if you have a multiple page document, or the current page, or a range of pages.  For the Settings the OCR will use, I prefer the ones in the image below.

ClearScan is new to Acrobat 9 and why I like using 9 instead of a previous version. In previous versions, the best setting to use was "Searchable Image." Using Searchable Image, you end up with the picture but it is compressed, and also a type layer behind the image that Acrobat then can use for searches, etc. Since it keeps the picture, using the "Searchable Image" settings leaves you with a much larger document, especially if your "Downsample" setting is at 600 dpi. The difference between "Searchable Image" and "Searchable Image (Exact)" is that the Exact option will keep the original image without compression, giving you an even larger final document size.

ClearScan actually creates a custom font out of the picture, turning your bitmap text into vectors. This allows for a much smaller final document size and better looking letters. For the third setting in this menu, I like to use the highest resolution possible in the "Downsample" option. It also keeps the letters looking their best.

To edit your settings, click on the "Edit" button. Once they are set, click ok to continue.

The OCR will now run. How long this takes depends on how many pages the pdf has and how much text are on those pages. Also, remember that the higher resolution your original image is, the better the OCR will recognize your text.

Here is a close up sample of my pdf document of an image of text before OCR. Note the artifacting around the letters.

And here is a close up of my pdf after the OCR has run. The type is no longer bitmapped, but is magically transformed into vectors.

Voila, now I have selectable text:

Once my text is really text, I can do all sorts of things with it in Acrobat.

Or I could select it all, copy it, launch InDesign, and paste it into a document where I can select which ever font I wish my text to be and move on from there to make any type corrections or layout modifications. The image below is small, but it is trying to show that my font has been changed from the custom OCR font to Arial.

The OCR in Acrobat is not perfect. It didn't recognize the fancy drop cap on the page as text, and some of the letters came out wrong (for example, the capital letter "I" and the numeral "1" can look a lot alike in some fonts), so a quick proofread was necessary. However, it was much faster running the OCR than having me sit down and type in a bunch of pages of text, (and much more accurate, too).

Adobe has been expanding Acrobat's capabilities with each version release. There's more to it than just pdf creation nowadays. We'll look at more useful Acrobat features in future posts.

Social Media Technology & Utah

Are you interested in where social media is going in Utah?

There will be a forum with Senator Orrin Hatch and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook speaking on this subject on Friday, March 29, 2011 in Provo, Utah at BYU's Marriott Center, 11 AM.

It is free (no tickets necessary), and anyone can attend, but it is requested that you are in a seat by 10:45 AM.  After the main presentation, the speakers will answer questions from the public submitted to BYU's Facebook page.

Background Tasks in InDesign CS5

Wonder where that progress bar went when exporting a pdf from an InDesign document? As of CS5, it's now in the background!

That's great news for those who wish to keep working on something else while a document is being exported. Not only will it export one document in the background, but you can queue up several to export, one after another. Just know that there is no changing the order of which one goes first once the documents are queued up: the order in which they are exported is the order they are produced.

For those who want to see exactly what is going on in the background, go to Window > Utilities > Background Tasks to bring up a window that shows what background tasks are in use, what order they are in, and how far along they are in the process. It's also helpful to see when InDesign is done with a specific document so you can safely close it.

Right now, File > Export (or Cmd/Cntrl + E), Adobe pdf (print) runs in the background, but not File > Export, Adobe pdf (interactive). Also, exporting a pdf from a book document isn't a background task yet. Just plain printing (Cmd/Cntrl +P) from InDesign is also not a background task. However, exporting to IDML is a background task. (This is a useful format if you would like someone to be able to open your CS5 document in CS4.)

Hopefully, this new feature will free up some time that would otherwise be spent waiting and watching a progress bar.

Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill

One of my favorite new capabilities in Photoshop CS5 is the Content Aware Fill. When I saw the pre-release demonstration of this tool, at first my jaw dropped in admiration, then I cheered. And then I calculated the soonest I could possibly get my grubby little hands on the new Photoshop. Gone are the days of tediously using the stamp tool to clone away unwanted and distracting objects in photos!

When you use the content aware fill, Photoshop is going to analyze your image and create a background fill of what it thinks the image would look like if that unwanted object was never there.

Here's my original image. Just an old snapshot.

Not bad, but what if the big pole on the right could go away? And the oil spots on the concrete, and also the street lights in the background? I think it would look better. (Did you even notice the oil spots until I mentioned them?)

So here we go. (in Photoshop CS5) The first step is to never work on your original photo. Either save a copy as a new file, or work on a new layer (Control/Command + J for layer duplication!)

Once you have your working photo, use a lasso tool, or your favorite selection tool to loosely select the object you want to have removed. Don't make the selection right on the edge of your object! In the example below, I used the polygonal lasso tool because my selection shape was going to be roughly rectangular.

Then, if you are working on your Background layer, you can just hit delete and a Fill menu comes up. But if you are working on any other layer in your image, you need to go to Edit < Fill. A menu comes up.

I really prefer using the keyboard shortcut for going there. It is Shift + F5.
So here is the Fill menu.

If your drop down menu doesn't say "Content Aware" (like the one above), switch it, so it looks like the image below.

Once you have this selected, click ok.

The computer will chew on this for a little bit. My selection isn't large, so it only took a couple of seconds. The larger the area selected, the longer this processing time takes. Let's see what it did…

I left the selection on, so you could see the area. It's not perfect. So you can either touch it up by hand, or you could reselect the areas that need improving, and then run the Content Aware Fill again, just like we did the first time. Here's my touched up version:

You'd never have known it was there. Hurray! Okay, so what about the oil spots? Same thing. Loosely select the areas you want gone, bring up the fill menu (remember it's Shift F5, or hit delete if you are on the Background layer) and the magical Content Aware Tool will fill it in.

And the pesky lamp posts in the background? Gone.

Even the one by the guy's head can be mostly taken out with Content Aware Fill.

Just to show the whole truth, here's what Photoshop will do if you select something too complicated:

Oops! With practice, you'll learn what will fill well, and what will end up looking like this.

Okay, after all of that touch up, here's what our final image looks like:

Your eye is no longer drawn away from the people in the image to look over at the pole. And even though the oil spots weren't terribly distracting, you have to agree the image looks better without them.

The Content Aware Fill can also be used in smallish places with the Spot Healing Brush tool. First, select that tool in Photoshop, second go to the top bar that shows that tool's options, and select the Content Aware radial button:

Then you can "paint" with that tool, and the fill will be healed using the new Content Aware capabilities.

Fun, right? Quite useful, too. With this new feature in CS5 Photoshop, you can quickly touch up photos, eliminating much of the need for tedious manual cloning in. I wouldn't want to do touch ups with out it now.

Our New Digital Press-a Xerox 7002

We are pleased to announce Lorraine Press's newest addition of a Xerox DocuColor 7002.

This new digital press is has improved productivity turnaround times and outstanding image quality. An inline spectrophotometer helps keep the color consistent time after time. Plus, the feature we've heard the most positive feedback on is the new matte toner. The look and feel of this toner is closer to looking like offset ink.

There will be no guess work about your job's color: the proofs off this machine are printed on the exact stock of your job.

We are excited to share our improved capabilities with you. Contact us for more information, or for a quote for our new Xerox 7002.

An Online Collection of Symbols

I have found an interesting collection of symbols online. The website is The Noun Project.

The site specializes in "sharing, celebrating, and enhancing the world's visual language." The symbols on this site are downloadable, high quality, and in the public domain. So the next time you are asked to create a "Caution, Slippery When Icy" sign for a company's parking lot, you can now find the perfect symbol to help illustrate it.

Today's Favorite InDesign CS5 Feature

A while ago, we started out a blog post with a thought exercise. Well, today we are going to leave the brain alone, and work on some hand-eye coordination skills.

You may be asking, what does hand-eye coordination have to do with InDesign?

Well, there are some really handy features in CS5 that require the use of both hands.

But today we are going to concentrate on InDesign's Super Step and Repeat capability, or sometimes called "gridification." It is available in CS5 only.

Let's start out easy. In an open document in InDesign CS5, select your rectangle tool. This will also work with any ellipse, polygon, or text frame, too. Start to draw your rectangle by clicking and holding down the mouse button. As you draw your rectangle (with mouse button continuously held down), use your left hand to hit the right arrow key. If you hit the right arrow key once, you'll then see two rectangles, hit it again, you'll get three. Move your mouse across the page to enlarge the rectangles until they are the size you want and only then let go of the mouse button. You have a perfect line of evenly spaced rectangles.

To summarize: to make a horizontally aligned row of perfectly duplicated rectangles, hit the right arrow key as many times as you need as you drag to the right across your page.

Oh, you want a column of duplicated rectangles, not a row? Easy! To make one column while drawing the rectangles, hit the up arrow key as many times as you need and then drag down all while holding down the mouse button.

To make a grid of perfectly spaced rectangles, say four across and four down, hit the right arrow three times and the up arrow key three times and drag diagonally down and across the page before letting go of the mouse button.

Want squares? Do all that while holding down the shift key.  Come on, stretch those fingers across the keyboard!

Okay, now I am just messing with you. You don't have to hold down the shift key while hitting the arrow keys. Just hold it down after you have the number of rectangles you want, and your rectangles turn to squares.

Did you hit the arrow keys way too many times and now you have about 100 rectangles across the page? Don't worry, the left arrow key and down arrow key can remove those. Hit these keys as many times as you need to control your rectangle growth.

And to top this feature off with a cherry, you can do this while placing multiple images. Let's say you have four images queued up in your cursor (command+D, select four images, click ok). Start drawing out a frame, hit the right and up arrow keys once each as you are drawing the frame, and suddenly you have four perfectly spaced, equal in size frames. Let go of the mouse button when your frames are the size you want, and InDesign places your four images into your four frames. Ta-da!

But wait, there's more!

Let's say you already have your perfect shape on the page, you just need more of them. You may already know that you can hold down the control and option/alt keys as you click and drag on the shape to create one duplicate. But with the new Super Step and Repeat, you can control+alt click your object, and then while holding down the mouse button, let go of the control and alt keys, move your hand over to the arrow keys and hit the up or right arrow keys to make multiple duplicates of that shape. Moving around your duplicated objects with the mouse (before letting go of the mouse), redistributes the spacing between your duplicated shapes. Used this way, the Super Step and Repeat doesn't change the size of your shape at all, it only changes the spacing between your copies.

In fact you can have one shape at the top left of your page, then control+alt click and drag to make the second shape, then, all while holding down the mouse button, move that second shape to the bottom right of your page, and then use the arrow keys to fill your page up with a beautiful grid of shapes.

Okay, if you haven't already opened up your InDesign CS5 to try this, you probably are dying to now. So I won't keep you. Have fun exploring the fabulous possibilities of this new capability in InDesign.