The Best Way to Convert Low-Quality PDF to High-Quality PDF

PDFs are a common choice for distributing and archiving documents across various sectors. Nevertheless, the quality of a document can occasionally degrade due to various problems. The main culprits behind this dilemma are compression artifacts and inadequate scanning techniques. Hence, converting a low-quality PDF to a high-quality PDF version can be essential to many. It can ensure that you are able to retain the document’s clarity, readability, and professionalism.

Transforming them into high-quality PDFs can significantly enhance their usability and presentation. This guide will reveal the best tool to achieve a superior-quality conversion and ensure your documents meet the highest standards of clarity and detail.

Part 1. Essential Reasons Explaining Why Convert Low-Quality PDF to High-Quality PDF

The necessity to perform this conversion isn't just about aesthetics purposes. Summarized below are several crucial reasons for converting low-quality PDFs to high-quality:

1. Low-quality PDFs often suffer from poor resolution, blurry text, and distorted images, making them difficult to read and comprehend.
2. High-quality PDFs preserve the accuracy and integrity of data and visuals like charts, graphs, and other fine details.
3. The print quality of low-resolution PDFs is poor, with text and images appearing pixelated or blurred which can be fixed by converting them.
4. When high-quality PDFs are involved, it is easier for multiple users to review, annotate, and share documents.

Part 2. A Comprehensive Guide to Converting Low-Quality PDFs to High Quality

Leveraging OCR technology is essential to effectively converting low-quality scanned PDFs into high-quality, editable, and searchable documents. A standout option for this task is UPDF, which is renowned for its advanced OCR capabilities. It enhances scanned documents by making their text and content editable and searchable to improve document quality and facilitate efficient editing and data extraction. Download it for a free trial.

When using UPDF to enact OCR on your low-quality documents, you get a plethora of options to choose from. These range from options for layout and image quality to image compression and multilingual support. Furthermore, you also get the option to convert editable PDFs into image-only files to stop people from editing the documents. Explained below are the comprehensive instructions needed for low-quality PDF to high-quality PDF conversion:

Step 1. Get Access to OCR in UPDF

After you have UPDF installed and running on your system, employ the "Open File" option to access the low-quality PDF file. Once it is displayed on the window, click the "Recognize Text using OCR" icon from the right side panel to access the available options.

Step 2. Select Document Type & Document Layout

The next thing you need to do is select the document type you want in the result after performing OCR. To get an editable and searchable high-quality PDF, choose "Searchable PDF" as your choice. In the "Layout" options, you get three options that include "Text and pictures only," "Text over the page Image," and "Text under the page image."

Step 3. Make Desired Choices in Layout Settings

Apart from choosing a layout, you can further customize it by clicking the "Gear" icon located in front of "Layout" to access "Layout Settings." Here, you can select "Keep Pictures" by defining image quality as "low," "balanced," and "high." You can also choose to enable image compression using the MRC-based technique. Other choices that can be made are "Keep Page Numbers, Headers, and Footers" and "Keep Text and Background Colors."

Step 4. Define Document Language and Image Resolution

When done with layout settings, move to select the language of your targeted low-quality document. UPDF offers support for more than 38 languages, and you can even select more than one language for OCR. Following that, decide upon the resolution of the document images you want. You can let the program "Detect Optimal Resolution" choose one between 72dpi, 150dpi, and 300dpi.

Step 5. Select the Document Pages for OCR

Next, you can select the specific page range of the document if you don't want to run OCR on the whole document. The other option available in this scenario is to select between odd or even pages for the operation. When you are done with all the required settings, hit "Perform OCR" to kickstart the quality conversion process.

Step 6. Complete OCR to Get High-Quality PDF

Once you tap "Perform OCR," the program will need you to save the new file first. When you do that, the OCR conversion will start with the progress being shown on the screen. The newly converted file will automatically open in UPDF where you will be able to perform other necessary edits.

OCR Document Layouts

As we mentioned before, there are three options available when performing OCR on a PDF. To better understand what each option means and the result you get, they are summarized below:

1. Text and Pictures Only

This layout option processes the scanned document by recognizing and extracting only the text and pictures. It ignores any background images or complex layout elements, and the document usually looks slightly different from the original.

2. Text Over the Page Image

With this option, the OCR process recognizes and extracts text and overlays it on top of the existing page image. The resulting document will display the recognized text on top of the original scanned background image. As for the document layout compared to the original is concerned, it will be slightly different.

3. Text Under the Page Image

When you use this option, it extracts the text from the scanned document and places it beneath the original page image. The resulting PDF will have a layer of text underneath the background image, which is invisible but searchable and editable. A benefit of using this option is that it maintains the identical layout as the original PDF.

Ready to turn your low-quality PDF to a high-quality one? Download UPDF!

Part 3. Other Progressive Features of UPDF For Enhancing PDFs

Beyond its powerful OCR capabilities to convert low-quality PDFs to high-quality, it offers a suite of advanced PDF tools designed to help users. This PDF editor can enhance and optimize the appearance and functionality of their PDFs. Summarized below are a few of the key features UPDF provides for improving your PDFs:

1. Comprehensive Text Editing

Supporting one of the most comprehensive PDF editing features, it lets you adjust text font size, style, color, and alignment to ensure consistency and clarity throughout your document. You can insert additional text wherever necessary for annotations, updates, or adding new sections to your PDF. Moreover, it lets you apply bold, italics, underline, and other formatting options to emphasize key points or improve readability.

2. Annotation and Markup Tools

UPDF offers a variety of annotation tools that allow you to interact with your PDF documents more effectively. You can emphasize key text by highlighting or underlining it or use strikethrough to mark content that needs revision or removal. It lets you add sticky notes or comment boxes to leave feedback and use shapes to draw attention to specific areas of your document.

3. Page Management Features

Its page management tools enable users to organize PDFs more effectively by manipulating the document structure. You can drag and drop pages to rearrange them, ensuring the content flows logically. It allows you to easily add new pages, remove unnecessary ones, or rotate pages to correct orientation issues. Furthermore, you can extract specific pages from a larger document or split a PDF into multiple smaller files.

4. Form Creation and Editing

The ability to simplify creating and editing interactive forms within your PDFs makes it a user favorite. It supports inserting text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more to create interactive forms that can be filled out. Users can also modify existing form fields to update or improve functionality, ensuring that forms are easy to use and accurately capture the needed information.

Conclusion

To summarize, converting low-quality PDFs to high-quality PDFs is essential for ensuring clarity and professionalism. When PDFs require enhancement, having the right tools at your disposal can make a difference. UPDF stands out as an all-in-one solution that excels in OCR capabilities and offers a wide range of editing features to improve the functionality of your PDFs. It provides everything you need to transform your documents into polished and high-quality assets.