iAnnotate and OCR Problems Highlighting Documents

Other than junk mail, we scan the hundreds of documents that we receive weekly and these documents, for the most part, are not scanned for OCR (optical character recognition). Acrobat Pro does a nice job of converting a scanned pdf to OCR but, if the document hasn’t been processed that way, it is not read as “text.” This is significant because apps like iAnnotate and Goodreader will not allow a user to highlight non-OCR’d text.

For example, I’m getting ready for a short trial on Thursday. I was unable to highlight a deposition in iAnnotate because it was not OCR processed. This is a big problem because, in order to highlight, I would have to open the transcript in Acrobat Pro, run an OCR, save the document in the OCR format (hoping that Acrobat correctly processed the OCR), move the file to Dropbox and then hope that all goes well for its use in iAnnotate. This is fairly onerous (tedious) given these steps.

Alternatively, you can use iAnnotate’s pencil tool that allows you to draw on the text. I like this tool and it’s great for many things, e.g., marking up an exhibit, circling and handwriting notes, but I really want the ability to highlight. This is my polite plea to the iAnnotate developer to develop an OCR tool. At that point in time, the program would be nearly perfect.