Adobe Acrobat – Unable to locate the Paper Capture recognition service. Your installation may be corrupt.

When you attempt to apply optical character recognition (OCR) to a file, you receive the error message, “Acrobat could not access the recognition service because: unable to locate the paper capture recognition service.”

To fix the error, try the following solutions in the order they appear below.

Solution 1: Copy the files from the ‘iDRS15’ folder to the ‘PaperCapture’ and ‘plug_ins’ folders in Acrobat

1. Go to the location:C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\<Acrobat Version>\Acrobat\plug_ins\PaperCapture\iDRS15For example, for Acrobat DC, go to:C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\plug_ins\PaperCapture\iDRS15
2. Copy all the files in the folder.
3. Go to the following location and paste the copied files:C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\<Acrobat Version>\Acrobat\plug_ins\PaperCapture
4. Go to the location mentioned in Step 1, and copy all the files again.
5. Go to the following location and paste the copied files:C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\<Acrobat Version>\Acrobat\plug_ins

Try running OCR using the Enhanced Scans tool and then from the Edit PDF tool. (You can select the tools from the right panel in Acrobat.)

Solution 2: Uninstall and reinstall Acrobat

You can sometimes resolve the error by uninstalling and reinstalling Acrobat.

1. Uninstall Acrobat from your computer:
   1. Open the Run command dialog by pressing the Windows key and the R key.
   2. In the dialog, type Control Panel and click OK.
   3. In the Control Panel, select Program and Features, and then select Acrobat from the list of installed programs.
   4. Click Uninstall and follow the prompts to uninstall Acrobat.
2. Reinstall the latest version of Acrobat on your computer: