I am glad this idea resurfaced, even if it took nearly three years and a single vote.

I have used Adobe products professionally for over twenty years. Acrobat remains best in class for OCR, document structure, and publishing workflows. That is exactly why this feature still matters. Adobe is one of the few companies positioned to do this correctly.

Requested Feature:
Music font and staff recognition within Acrobat OCR
Recognition of staves, notes, clefs, dynamics, articulations, tempo markings, and standard notation symbols as structured musical elements rather than decorative text or lines.

Today, Acrobat OCR attempts to process sheet music but inevitably breaks it. Staves are treated as underlines. Notes are replaced with system fonts. Musical meaning is lost. I have repeatedly encountered this while editing and producing professional music books that include engraved notation.

There are existing tools attempting this. Neuratron PhotoScore Ultimate and ScanScore Professional are examples. Their accuracy is inconsistent, error prone, and requires heavy manual correction even with clean source material. They work in isolation and do not integrate well into modern document workflows.

This is where Acrobat could clearly lead.

A realistic implementation path does not require reinventing notation software:

Add an optional OCR mode for musical notation alongside language recognition.

Detect staff systems as structured objects, not flattened graphics.

Identify symbolic elements such as notes, rests, clefs, key and time signatures, and dynamics.

Preserve spatial relationships so musical meaning remains intact.

Output recognized notation to a tagged PDF layer or MusicXML export, similar to how searchable text layers work today.

Keep the feature fully optional to avoid affecting standard OCR use cases.

Beyond professional publishing, this has a clear accessibility benefit. Properly recognized musical notation could allow screen readers, zoom tools, and reflow systems to interpret sheet music meaningfully. This is currently a major barrier for visually impaired musicians and students.

With current AI driven pattern recognition, layout analysis, and Adobe’s existing OCR infrastructure, this feature feels less speculative and more inevitable.

If implemented even at a foundational level, Acrobat would become the strongest bridge between scanned sheet music, accessibility, archiving, and professional editing workflows.