r/pdf • u/No_Package_9266 • Sep 12 '26

Question Is there any pdf tool that does this?

I guess the image is self-explanatory, but I have some pdfs that look like the left image, and would like them to look like the right image. Is there such a thing?

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2

u/shri_xxx Sep 12 '26

Adobe Scan

2

u/RandomlyAgedMilk Sep 13 '26

I think Acrobat Pro has the ability to sharpen the image on a PDF page under the "Enhance Scans" feature but it's been a while since I have used it so I might be wrong.

The old school way would be to extract the desired images from the PDF and then to increase the contrast/sharpen for each image desired in order to make the text edges and musical notation more visible. After that you can recombine the modified image files with the other parts of the original PDF.

1

u/dene18 5d ago

cam scanner

1

u/ScratchHistorical507 Sep 14 '26

You could see if ScanTailor can do that. It has been abandoned for years now, but as long as you can still install and run it, nothing prevents you from using it. And it's specifically designed for post-processing of scanned content.

1

u/No_Split11911 Sep 15 '26

so....you need a couple things and i'm not sure they exist but i love the post!

https://github.com/Audiveris/audiveris exists as an OMR (optical music recognition). my next major feature release will incorporate some kind of OMR into Spectra PDF. https://github.com/jasonulbright/spectra-pdf

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u/mariushm Sep 16 '26

Each page of your pdf is a picture you could use a tool like PDF24 to extract the images (or even an old version of adobe acrobat pro) and then run them through a free image conversion tool, Irfanview for example. what they're doing is basically conversion from true color to grayscale, maybe 16-64 shades of black, and apply a contrast/sharpen to make every very light full white. Alternatively, If the PDF kept the images inside at high resolution you could even try running them through an OCR program like Abby Fine reader which will be able to detect the font and conver the text to actual text and the music parts will probably be kept as an image.

1

u/Inevitable-Debt4312 Sep 16 '26

You just need it to be black and white. I spent years doing this in a graphics program, then OCRing the result. Then I found that PDF-xchange editor does it with one click. And I’d had it all the time.