How can I call the Acrobat feature OCR from C#?

Question

I want to write a C# application that can utilize the OCR function in Adobe Acrobat. How can I call this? Is there a public API?

Answer 1

There is no direct Adobe OCR API suitable for .net. There are some alternatives though, for what you are trying to achieve. There is a open-source .Net wrapper for Google's open-source Tesseract OCR available on GitHub here: https://github.com/charlesw/tesseract. This should get you OCR capability within C#.

From the documentation:

Getting started quickly

1. Add the Tesseract NuGet Package by running Install-Package Tesseract from the Package Manager Console.
2. Ensure you have Visual Studio 2012 x86 & x64 runtimes installed
3. Download language data files for tesseract 3.02 from tesseract-ocr and add them to your project, ensure 'Copy to output directory' is set to Always.
4. Check out the samples solution ~/Samples/Tesseract.Samples.sln for a working example

Answer 2

I believe this is part of the Adobe Reader software and is not accessible through an API. There's an API and libraries for constructing PDF documents per the format specifications, but OCR is something that concerns the reader and not the format. I'm afraid you would either have to use another library or implement it yourself.