Originally Posted by
Landing Gear
The plot thickens.
I e-mailed the file to a friend who has full Acrobat. He opened it but the edit tools (i.e. highlight, which I needed) would not work. He got some kind of error message about not being able to edit the image.
I made this file by using HP Scanning Software version 4.5 which has no setting for specifying the type of PDF other than things like resolution, sharpness, etc.
As Porkrind noted, your scanning software created an image PDF. The full version of Acrobat can do OCR (and quite effectively). This permits editing, cutting and pasting and highlighting, among other things. You can't tell the difference between an OCR'd pdf and an image pdf just by looking at it. However, in the full version of Acrobat, you'll be offered the OCR option under Documents if you've an image pdf.