OCR software for Mac

August 15, 2023 1:54 PM

I'm looking for OCR software for Mac. My needs are pretty basic—just the occasional PDF, nothing heavy-duty. I strongly prefer to pay a one-time fee rather than a subscription. I also would prefer a stand-alone application rather than a web-based tool. Thank you for your suggestions.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

The built-in Preview app in macOS includes OCR (which it calls “Live Text”). Annoyingly, it is enabled only for image files, not PDF files. You can take a screen-shot of a PDF and then you select text in the screenshot... but this will be increasingly tedious for long multi-page documents.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:03 PM on August 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

My needs are pretty basic—just the occasional PDF, nothing heavy-duty.

To clarify: do you need to extract text from an occasional PDF, or do you need to convert a scanned PDF into an editable/searchable PDF, similar to the Adobe Acrobat function?
posted by zamboni at 2:24 PM on August 15, 2023

Response by poster: To clarify: do you need to extract text from an occasional PDF, or do you need to convert a scanned PDF into an editable/searchable PDF, similar to the Adobe Acrobat function?

Good question. The latter.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 2:54 PM on August 15, 2023

Do you know R or Python at all? Pretty easy to do, I’ve used Abby or tesseract or the google cloud API.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:40 PM on August 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Are you comfortable at the command line? OCRmyPDF worked well for me; looking around, I see a couple of GUI wrappers for it. It's open source, using the Tesseract engine for OCR.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:39 AM on August 16, 2023

I use Cisdem. It works pretty well and has the advantage for me but maybe not for you that it works in various languages
posted by TheRaven at 2:08 AM on August 16, 2023

I use Nitro PDF Pro. (Nitro bought PDFPenPRo). This one is pretty robust, but a little expensive - a lot of mac based lawyers use it. It's $180, one time purchase.
posted by bluesky78987 at 7:27 AM on August 16, 2023