

- #IMAGE TRACING SOFTWARE FOR MAC HOW TO#
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This usually occurs when the PDF has been created from CAD (often AutoCAD ®) or a non-TrueType font is used. Vector Characters – Created by line segments that are used to draw the shape of each character.This layer is what allows you to search, select, and highlight images that don’t have real text. In other words, OCR interprets the images on a scanned PDF and creates an invisible text layer on top of them. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Text – Running OCR (for Revu eXtreme only) allows for the translation of raster and vector images into searchable data.The text is searchable and can always be selected. When you zoom in on the text, the edges of the characters always look sharp and crisp – no matter how close you zoom in. PDFs created from character-based programs (e.g., Word ® and Excel ®) almost always create PDFs that contain real text. PDF Text Elements (or Real Text) – Always preferred for PDFs because it results in more responsive content.If the characters don’t highlight, they are either a raster or vector image. All text in the PDF should highlight in blue. From the Menu Bar, go to Edit > PDF Content > Select All Text (in Revu 2017 & below, go to Edit > Select > Select All Text). To avoid confusion, “characters” will refer to text in general while “text” will refer to PDF text elements, or “real text.”īefore going into details, there is a quick test to determine if your PDF contains text. As such, this type of “text” is essentially an image that cannot be selected, searched, or edited. Although these elements appear to be text, they do not have the data that allows a computer to recognize it as text. Instead, it might be defined by raster dots or vector line segments. You may see text characters in the PDF, but those characters are not necessarily PDF text elements. Text is an independent type of content in PDFs. As such, measurements and takeoffs (as well as their calibration) are precise in a vector PDF because you can use Snap to Content to snap to the vector lines in the PDF. The benefit of working with a vector PDF is that the display of the geometry remains sharp when you zoom in to see details of the drawing.

You should always try to work with vector PDFs created from the source instead of creating PDFs from scans. Vector PDFs are usually preferred to raster PDFs because they contain more data that make it easier to work with. Most PDFs created from CAD (Computer-Aided Design) are vector-based. VectorĪ vector-based PDF uses line segments to define all of the geometry on the page. The lines and characters on the page will either change to a grid of square dots or become blurry. To determine if a PDF is a raster image, or scan, just zoom in very closely. Therefore, there are no lines for the Snap to Content function to snap to, and no text to select or search. This means that a scanned or raster PDF only contains a grid of dots that represent lines and text it does not actually contain lines or text that a computer can recognize. A scanned PDF is created by making a bitmap image (like a JPEG or TIFF) of the page, and placing that image on the PDF page. One example of a raster PDF is a file created from scanning a paper.
#IMAGE TRACING SOFTWARE FOR MAC SERIES#
Raster PDFĪ raster image is created from a series of square dots called pixels. Let’s look at the difference between raster and vector content in a PDF.

The page may appear to contain lines and characters, but the underlying elements that represent them in the PDF may not be vector lines and text elements, which are needed to snap to content and search and select text. Some PDFs contain more information than others, even though they seem indistinguishable at first. The reason both of these occur is that PDFs aren’t all created in the same way.

#IMAGE TRACING SOFTWARE FOR MAC HOW TO#
How to determine whether your PDF is raster- or vector-based, and how this affects the ability to snap to an object or select text.
