- April 18, 2023
- Brad Selbst, Sales Vice President
In a previous article, we covered how to change the Foxit PDF Editor interface language. Now let’s look at some features you may want to use when working with multiple languages in one document and then we will look at some features that can help with multiple multilingual files at once, and we’ll even explore some other use cases.
Using OCR to convert multiple languages
In our global world, many businesses function across borders, relying upon multiple languages to get the job done. This is why Foxit PDF Editor supports multilingual Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
If you’re dealing with a document that’s not searchable (static image vs. live text) and contains multiple languages, you can translate it with Foxit PDF Editor.
To create a searchable PDF from a static document that has more than one language in it, simply do the following:
- Open the Convert toolbar by using one of the following methods:
- Choose Tools > Convert.
- Click
in the Common Tools toolbar, and choose Convert.
- Click OCR > Current File.
- In the Select OCR Engine dialog box (shown below), do the following:
- Specify the page range to be OCRed.
- Select the language(s) used in your document.
- Choose the output type: 1) Searchable Text Image: Makes the image text searchable. 2) Editable Text: Makes the image text editable.
- Check Find All Suspects (Show all OCR results that may need to be changed.) option if you want the OCR suspects to be displayed for you to check and correct after the recognition.
- Click OK to start text recognition.
OCR multiple multilingual files at the same time
You’re not limited to converting multilingual documents one at a time.
To recognize text in multiple PDF files, do this:
- Open the Convert toolbar by one of the following:
- Choose Tools > Convert.
- Click in the Common Tools toolbar, and choose Convert.
- Click OCR > Multiple Files.
- In the OCR Multiple Files dialog box, do the following:
- Click Add files, and choose Add Files, Add Folder, or Add Open Files to add a file, folder, or opened file.
- After adding the files, use the Move up or Move Down button to reorder the files, if necessary.
- Click Remove to remove the added file from the list, if necessary.
- Click Output Options to select the destination folder and choose how to name the new file and whether to overwrite an existing one.
- Click OK.
- In the Select OCR Engine dialog box, select the language and output type, and click OK.
With Foxit PDF Editor, you can always find what you’re searching for, even if it’s in various languages.
Having Foxit PDF Editor speak other languages aloud
Read Out Loud uses the available voices installed on your system. If you have SAPI 5 voices installed from text-to-speech or language applications, you can choose them to read your PDFs.
Making documents accessible in other languages
Some screen readers read the text in the language specified for the document. Setting the Primary Language rule means that Foxit software checks whether the primary text language for the document is specified. If no language was set, only Foxit PDF Editor Pro allows you to fix this issue.
You can set the language by right-clicking the rule in the Accessibility Check panel in the navigation pane, choosing Fix from the context menu, then selecting a language in the Set Reading Language dialog box. You can also set the language manually by doing either of the following:
- Set the language for text in a subtree of the tags tree in the Tags panel. Right-click an element, choose Properties…, and select a language in the Object Properties dialog box.
- Set the language for a block of text in the Content panel. Right-click the text element or container element, choose Properties…, and select a language in the Object Properties dialog box.
Foxit has more than 700 million users worldwide who live in over 200 countries and speak many different languages. That’s why Foxit PDF Editor allows you to use other languages, giving you more choices to meet your language needs.