I’ve created flyers in Acorn 5 that include Images and text. When I export the file to PDF, the PDF is an image, which means the file is very large and the text is not searchable.
Is there a way to export an acorn file to PDF so that the text is searchable? I’ve looked through the online doc, FAQ, and forums, and I haven’t found any mention of this. Thanks for any info.
I don’t know, but as a suggestion, what if you put the picture in a word procesing file and expoert/print as a pdf?
Acorn will create a pure vector PDF, if there are no bitmap/pixel operations in the images. This includes things like layer styles and bitmap layers. So basically, if you only have shape layers in your image, then it’ll create what you want.
What you want to do is apply optical character recognition (OCR) to the images that comprise the PDF. Acorn doesn’t do that, but you can run Acorn’s image file through an open source OCR tool to get the result you want. Tesseract is a command line tool, but it’s very simple to use.
First, you’d need to install Homebrew. Then, in Terminal, you just type
brew install tesseract
After that
tesseract [drop your file here] [drop your file here again but then change the name slightly] pdf
and the new file it generates (with the slightly changed name) will be a PDF with searchable text.
The only downside is that Tesseract doesn’t read PDFs, but it does write them. So your input file can’t be a PDF. If you’re starting with a PDF, you can first export it as a multi-page TIFF with Preview (or it might be possible also with Acorn).