Acrobat Pro: Turn Scaned Documents into Readable Ones

Turn scanned documents into readable (and searchable) ones with a built in function of Adobe Acrobat Professional
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
This is again a bit far from the usual trend of posts, but bear with me, I've been doing a lot of writing and copy and paste lately, so not so much SketchUp and Revit fun for some days.
This quick tip is regarding scanned documents. Some times you might need to work with them. Someone sends you a scanned pdf and you wish you could use part of that thext without retyping it. Well you can with just a few clicks.
The tip is assuming you have Adobe Acrobat Pro installed. What you need to do is simply open the PDF in Acrobat Pro (not in Acrobat Reader) and go to Document --> OCR Text Recognition --> Recognize Text Using OCR. See the image below.


After clicking on it, we will get a screen that will let us choose the OCR Language. It is important to select the right language, especially for those languages with special caracters. My mother tongue, catalan has these characters for example: à, è, é, í, ò, ó, ú, ç, l·l. If you don't select the right language some of this characters will be interpreted wrong. Like for instance ó tends to be read as a number 6 if you leave English as a language when scanning in Catalan or Spanish.


The Output is here called "Searchable Image". This is actually a great feature, because it keeps the image almost intact, while allowing you to search for the document on a full text search query.

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SketchUp Plugins: Export 3D PDFs

Export your SketchUp models to 3D PDF format to share them with people that doesn't have Sketchup
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
If you want to share your 3D model with someone that doesn't have SketchUp installed or you simply want to integrate your 3D model in a 3D presentation, you might be interested in this commercial plugin.
SimLab 3d PDF from Sketchup allows you to directly export 3D PDF from SketchUP. There is a free trial for 30 days. The license costs 95$.

Click on the image below to see a PDF created with this plugin


The free trial doesn't allow full control of the advanced features though. WIth a more complicated model, I also found some bugs (duplicated elements on the wrong position).

On the positive side, the plugin can export the section planes and it will add a buttpon to toggle them. So it really becomes like having sketchup (without editing tools) inside your pdf file. You can also select geometry and switch it off and on depending on what is it that you want to see.


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