Issue
When opening a PDF document in Intella's Previewer, no text appears despite being visible when opened in a different PDF viewer such as Adobe Acrobat.
Solution
- If you are unable to view text when opening a PDF document in Intella's Previewer, it may be due to the PDF document being generated by a scanner, fax, or containing password-protection or security settings against text extraction. The text may only be visible as an image in the Preview tab, rather than in the Contents tab.
- To view the PDF in its original layout, switch to the Preview tab or open it in a native PDF viewer such as Adobe Acrobat. Consider using OCR to convert scanned documents into searchable text.
Background information
When Intella indexes a PDF document containing text, the extracted text can be viewed in the Contents tab. However, the layout does not display in the same format as it is stored in the PDF document. Attachment icons replace images, and the Contents tab exclusively shows extracted text. In contrast, the Preview tab shows the pages as they were created. However, picture-like attachments such as scanned documents or faxes will show as images, and no text will appear in the Contents tab for extraction if the document has security settings against text extraction. Password-protected PDFs also require adding passwords to the case's Key Store to enable viewing in Intella's Previewer or using the "Open in External Application" feature.
It is worth noting that scanned documents must undergo Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert the text from an image to its digital form before it can be searched by keywords. OCR will produce the text in the OCR tab and allow for keyword searching.
Updated April 2023