OCR not making text searchable

gmankelty · 2025-06-18T13:05:07+00:00

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Is there some reason why OCR works on some text in a drawing file and not other text? It looks to be the same font as other text on the drawing that OCR was successful in making searchable. Sorry I am unable to include a snip due to IP. Can anyone share their OCR settings? I've been using Bluebeam for years and still have no idea what "Page Chunk Size" is. What I am trying to do is make all the callouts in a drawing package be searchable text. I have one group of callouts that haven't been able to get to work yet as the callout is placed within a hexagonal shape on the drawing.
Any tips would be appreciated. Thx

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Brandon Costlow

Are the parts you want to run OCR on flattened? Unflattened markups aren't searchable if memory serves me correctly.

gmankelty

Correct. Markups are only searchable when flattened. These are CAD callouts or maybe added with other software and then drawings appear to have been scanned. I work wot3h a lot of documents that are "Photoshop-CAD"

Brandon Costlow

I see. Well, CAD has it's SHX fonts that are different than true-type fonts. True-type fonts are the ones that naturally become searchable text in Bluebeam, but if the font used in the CAD program was an SHX font, they would need to export it as searchable text. I don't really get it, but those fonts seem to give OCR a hard time sometimes. As for the "photoshop" elements, that's why I would not skip vector pages, ensure it is detecting text in pictures and drawings, and enable page chunking at 1, so it would process each page one at a time. I think the detect vertical text option would be up to you, but I don't see any harm in asking the AI to look for it just in case it gets the orientation wrong.

Here's the setting I would expect to best handle these documents. I hope it helps…

gmankelty

Thanks Brandon, that is what I typically do. Just something about this text that it doesn't work with OCR. I tried it in another software and it did not search in that software either.
Thanks for your help.

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