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Fix Arabic Text Highlighting Not Working in Acrobat for iPhone
Question details
The user is unable to highlight Arabic text in scanned PDFs using the Acrobat mobile app, while English text highlighting works normally.
- Product
- Adobe Acrobat
- Device & OS
- iOS
- Scenario
- Attempting to select and highlight Arabic text within a scanned PDF document on an iPhone.
- Observed behavior
- The highlighting tool treats the scanned Arabic document as a flat image, preventing specific text selection until text recognition (OCR) is manually applied.
Ensure your Acrobat app is updated to the latest version and that your iPhone is connected to the internet, as some mobile text recognition features require cloud processing.
Run Text Recognition (OCR) Before Highlighting
Applying OCR converts the scanned document image into selectable text, enabling the highlighting tool to recognize the Arabic characters.
Scanned documents do not inherently contain readable text data. By running text recognition, the app scans the image and overlays selectable text.
Note that while the app can recognize the text, right-to-left languages like Arabic may experience imperfect highlighting behaviors on mobile platforms optimized for English.
Launch the Acrobat app on your iPhone and open the scanned PDF document containing the Arabic text.
Tap the highlighting tool icon located in the bottom toolbar of the application.
When a prompt appears informing you that the content is an image, tap the option to run text recognition.
Wait for the process to finish. Once a confirmation message appears, you can now tap and drag over the Arabic text to apply the highlight.
Use WPS Office to Extract and Highlight Text in Scanned PDFs
WPS Office offers robust PDF tools, including advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition), allowing you to seamlessly convert scanned documents into selectable text for accurate highlighting and editing.
- 1. Install WPS Office: Download and launch the free WPS Office app on your mobile device or computer.
- 2. Open your PDF: Navigate to your files and open the scanned PDF document using the WPS PDF viewer.
- 3. Apply OCR: Select the OCR (Text Recognition) tool from the bottom menu to process the scanned image into readable text.
- 4. Highlight text easily: Once the document is converted, tap the Annotation menu and use the Highlight tool to select your text.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't I highlight text in my scanned PDF?
Scanned PDFs are essentially flat images or photographs of a document. To make the text selectable for highlighting, you must first apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert the image pixels into recognizable text characters.
Does mobile OCR perfectly support Arabic text?
While many mobile PDF editors can recognize Arabic text, their primary rendering engines are often optimized for Latin-based languages. This means the text can be selected, but the highlight cursor might move from left to right rather than natively from right to left.
How do I know if my PDF requires text recognition?
If you try to tap and hold a word to select it and the entire page is selected as one single block, or if no text cursor appears at all, your document is a scanned image and requires OCR processing before you can interact with the text.
