Noodlesoft Forums

I have just gone paperless and now I get all of my bank statements via download. When I open the downloaded PDF's in Adobe Acrobat Pro, all the text can be selected and searched, so it appears the document has already been OCR'd. However, Hazel doesn't recognize any of the rules I have set up.

When I tried to OCR the document again, I get an error message "Acrobat cannot perform OCR because the page contains renderable text". I'm not a technical guy so not sure if that's maybe the reason Hazel isn't able to read the text.

I've tried to re-save the file as PDF or optimized PDF, but it still doesn't work.

Any ideas why these downloaded statements can't be recognized?

Try opening the file in Preview instead of Acrobat and see how the text is searchable there. Another thing to try is to paste the text into a plain text document and see if your rules work with that.

I am a new user trying out Hazel. Hazel's content function does not work on my bank statements and Time Warner Cable bill. Similar to above a renderable text error appears. Files are searchable Acrobat but not in Preview. Please advise or point to solution on the board.

If the text is not searchable in Preview then Hazel won't be able to see it either. I don't know what kind of magic Acrobat uses but maybe try some other PDF programs to see what they make of it.

Thank you for the response. I see others (https://vimeo.com/68593663) use the content function when working with their respective PDFs. Are there changes one can make to PDFs that would make it possible to use Hazel's content function? I was planning on downloading and using Hazel to organize future invoices and statements from institutions so perhaps there is something I can do at my end to make the PDFs workable for Hazel.

Try downloading a trial version of something like PDFPen. See if it is able to OCR it in a way that is usable. There might be other programs with trials out there but that's the first that comes to mind.

Your recommendation worked. Thank you.