Force Adobe OCR if page contains “renderable text” on Mac

Posted on May 2, 2013 | 1 Comment

This is a appears to be a difficult problem because there appears to be no straightforward way to remove renderable text. If you try to open the PDF in Preview and print as PDF or even as PostScript, the renderable text still remains.

The solution lies in exporting the PDF to an image format, e.g., TIFF. TIFF is better than JPEG because you don’t get rendering artifacts. Also it supports multi-page documents. PNG does not give artifacts, but also does not allow for multi-page documents.

When exporting to TIFF make sure you select a high DPI, e.g., 600, to preserve quality. The default is only 150 which is too low.

Then open the such created TIFF once more in Preview and re-export as PDF.

The such created PDF should pose no more problems for OCR in Acrobat.

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Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Workflow

How to disable Java on Mac OS X

Posted on March 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

With all the recent scare about Java on Mac OS X I spend a lot of time looking for good guides of how to disable or uninstall it. Unfortunately, good information is hard to find.

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Posted in Technology

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Adobe Acrobat (Pro) XI Install Error on OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on March 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

Have you had difficulty installing Acrobat 11 on Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2? I did too. And of course the solution is easy if you know how.

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Posted in Mac OS X Platform

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Visio 2010 Page Sizing & Printing Tips

Posted on March 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

Read more at MS Visio Blog

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Posted in MS-Windows Platform, Tips & Tricks

Shortcut to Task Manger in Windows 7

Posted on February 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

Control-Shift-Escape

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Posted in MS-Windows Platform, Tips & Tricks

How to Delete File Associations (Default Programs) in Windows 7

Posted on February 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

In windows XP this was easy, in Windows 7, apparently one needs to edit the registry as suggested here:

Let XYZ be the extension you want to deassociate.
With a registry editor (e.g., regedit.exe),

1. go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerFileExts
remove the subtree .XYZ

2. go to
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
remove the subtree .XYZ
remove the subtree XYZ_auto_file

When I tried this, step 1 seems to suffice. Why it has to be so complicated is beyond my understanding.

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Posted in MS-Windows Platform, Tips & Tricks

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MS-Office Custom Dictionary File

Posted on February 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

So you worked tirelessly and updated your custom dictionary on MS-Windows with all your specific technical terms of your area of work and then you get a new computer or a new hard drive and all is gone. How to avoid this? Simply copy the file “Custom.dic” from your old installation to the new one. Where is it? Here: “UsersUSERNAMEAppDataRoamingMicrosoftUProof”; simply replace “USERNAME” with your login ID.

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Posted in MS-Windows Platform, Tips & Tricks

Outlook Settings File Location – Autocompletion

Posted on February 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

One of the annoying aspects of working on a new computer is that Outlook does not know your past recipients. Name completion in e-mails only works for previous recipients. There is a simple solution. Copy the Outlook settings file from your old default installation to the new one. But where is it? On Windows 7, the file is called “MS Exchange Settings.NK2” and can be found here: “C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataRoamingMicrosoftOutlook”; simply replace “USERNAME” with your login ID.

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Posted in MS-Windows Platform, Tips & Tricks

Duplicate Database Structure in Bento 4

Posted on January 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

Bento 4 comes with a nice set of templates. It is also easy to customize these templates; however, once customized, there is no straightforward way to duplicate a database. For instance in my case I customized the “Vehicle Maintenance” Template by replacing the ‘Location’ field with a drop down menu populated by various places I go for my car service. I did not want to set this up from scratch for another vehicle. Continue reading →

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Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Technology, Tips & Tricks

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Finally a Store that knows its Grammar

Posted on July 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

How many times have I wondered if there are any stores that don’t say “xx items or less”

20110703-095415.jpg

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Posted in Language