Adobe Systems Incorporated in an American multinational software company headquartered in San Jose, California. They have an array of software applications widely used across many platforms in many industries. They're primary focus is on graphic design and computer applications but their use in theatre is undeniably influential; even as small as the work a stage manager does in the theatre industry which must be insignificant to the power the company wields in the document management industry. With the establishment of the Portable Document Format or pdf as we now call it a product line that became Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader was launched. PDF is now an international standard. Then, when Adobe acquired OCR Systems in 1992, the stage was set for Adobe to become a stage manager best friend. With the development of Adobe Pro in 1993 the evolution began to allow stage managers to manipulate documents in ways we had to type before.
Scanning is now so prevalent that I won't take time to go into the history of scanning. Most desk top printers have a scan function. Without doing the research I would say that almost all scanners have a pdf option for output of the scan (as they will also have a jpeg (joint photographic experts group) option for pictures. Both jpeg and pdf take pictures of the document that later can be printed and passed on or studied. With the acquisition of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) there came the tool that stage managers would eventually benefit from, the ability to turn a picture into text.
With OCR running in Adobe Pro you can now scan a script into a pdf format. You can take the script and tell the software in Adobe Pro to convert it from a pdf format and render it into text that can be manipulated. When you first import the pdf into Adobe Pro it will just be the document itself, but if you look in the navigation bar at the top right you will see you have three options: you have the options of Tools, Comments, and Share. If you click the Tools tab you will get a drop down menu that appears on the right hand side of your monitor. From there you have several options from Pages through Sign & Certify. Each option has an arrow that allows you to see further menu options. Here's where it gets exciting! Click the arrow next to Recognize Text you'll see a deeper menu that allows you the options of recognizing the text in this file or in multiple files. Go ahead and have it recognize the text in your file and see what happens.
As the software recognizes the text in your pdf file it also straightens out the pages that have been slightly askew in the scanner.