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Effortlessly Convert PDFs to Text: Top-Rated OCR Scanning Software for Mac

Posted on by Thao Nguyen

If you need to accurately scan and digitize documents, we’ve taken a look at the best OCR scanning software for Mac that scans paperwork into searchable PDFs and more.

Optical character recognition software (often referred to simply as scanning software) can scan, extract text, and make documents searchable and editable, including invoices, images, handwriting, magazines, textbooks, and more.

They can also scan documents on Mac without a document scanner.

With the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19), it’s more important than ever to be able to scan, sign, and digitize documents, and if you’re setting up a remote office, OCR software can also allow you to manage documents more efficiently.

What are the best OCR scanning software? Which is best? The best Mac OCR software we’ve found so far is Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, which is very fast and accurate in scanning documents and preserving formatting.

Since Adobe invented the PDF format, Acrobat Pro DC is also by far the best PDF editing software you’ll find on your Mac, allowing you to convert any paper document to PDF, making them easier to store, search, and share.

It is also the best software to sign documents on Mac if you need to scan and sign documents, including legally binding contracts.

Best scanning software for Mac

Before diving into the reviews, there are a few things to look out for when choosing the best scanning software for Mac to avoid disappointment.

  • One thing that stands out clearly in our study is that not all OCR scanners on Mac perform the same. Accuracy and speed vary widely, and there are definitely some that do it better than others. OCR is a highly specialized technology, and we’ve found that in most cases, you get what you pay for when it comes to software that scans text accurately and quickly. This is crucial if you want to avoid a lot of tedious manual corrections to text in PDFs and other documents. There are free OCR tools out there, but they don’t work well if you want good results.
  • The best OCR apps keep the original document formatted after the OCR scan. A cheap or free OCR app will only dump text files to your Mac (which is certainly fine if you only need it). However, most people want their document format to remain the same as the original, and budget OCR apps simply can’t do that. Top OCR tools can export to popular formats such as Microsoft Word and ePub/eBook formats without losing the original formatting of PDFs or documents.
  • The best OCR tools work well with all the text, but some have difficulties with certain types of documents. These include handwritten, documents that have been copied multiple times, faxes, text that is closely spaced, text in tables, underlined text, small print, and documents that are folded or wrinkled.

With that in mind, here is our list of the best OCR scanning software for Mac in ranked order.

Adob​​e Acrobat Pro DC

Mac OCR Scan Software Download: Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is the original OCR software for scanning documents and our choice of the best OCR software for Mac.

This is not surprising because once upon a time, Adobe Acrobat Pro was the only software that could convert PDFs into something that could be edited or searched on a Mac.

That’s because Adobe invented the PDF file format.

  • Special Limited Offer: Students and teachers get 60% off the entire Adobe Document Cloud suite

There are many other competitors in the market today, but Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is still very strong when it comes to doing almost anything with PDFs.

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC has a great desktop app for Mac, but you can also use it online through Adobe Document Cloud.

Even better, Adobe Acrobat is the only OCR software that is compatible with the latest M1 Macs. While most OCR applications require Rosetta to run on an M1 Mac, Adobe Acrobat runs natively on an Apple Silicon M1 Mac.

However, it’s important to note that Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is not primarily a dedicated OCR software.

Instead, it is a PDF conversion software with a built-in OCR engine that converts PDFs or other formats into content that can be searched or edited by keyword.

If you just want to make the text in your PDF document editable or searchable, it’s pretty straightforward.

  • Open a PDF file in Acrobat.
  • Click the Edit PDF tool in the right pane. Acrobat automatically performs an optical character recognition (OCR) scan of your document and converts it into a fully editable PDF copy almost instantly.
  • Click the element you want to edit. You’ll see that any new text you add matches the look of the original font.
  • Select File > Save As to save the newly edited document.

If you want to perform an OCR scan on images, scanned documents, or other files, the process is as follows:

  • Import files from your Mac or tablet document scanner into Acrobat. All documents must have a resolution of at least 72dpi (dots per inch) to be scanned in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, which is a fairly low requirement. However, Adobe recommends scanning at 300 dpi (magazine print quality) for the most accurate results. If you want to OCR multiple documents at once, you can also add multiple files.
  • When the document opens in Acrobat, click the Enhanced Scan option on the right:
  • Highlight the document or area you want to convert to an editable PDF:
  • Use the Adjust Enhancement Level slider to adjust the contrast to make the text as clear as possible.

If you have images in your document, the PDF Output Style option allows you to create 3 different types of PDFs, related to how Adobe Acrobat handles images.

You can choose to create searchable images, precise searchable images, and editable text and images.

  • A searchable image means that the image will be preserved, but corrected, and an invisible layer of text will be placed on it.
  • Exact Searchable Image preserves the original image position and does not correct it.
  • The editable text and images are synthesized into a new custom font that closely resembles the original font and retains the page background at a low resolution.

There’s also a downsampling option, which allows you to lower the resolution and thus the file size of the document you want OCR for, which is useful if it has a lot of images. Once the OCR scan is complete, downsampling reduces the number of pixels in the image.

  • Finally, select Recognize Text from the toolbar to start the OCR scan.
  • In a matter of seconds, you’ll have a searchable PDF that you can edit.

The difference between Adobe Acrobat Pro and ABBYY Finereader Pro is that in Acrobat, you can start editing PDFs right away, including formatting, text, and images.

At the same time, ABBYY’s product requires you to export to another format – such as Word, Excel, or Pages – in order to edit it.

Acrobat even allows you to add video and audio to PDF files and edit them in the Adobe Scan mobile app.

The OCR engine in previous versions of Acrobat was very slow and inaccurate, but now Adobe has improved it significantly. One major improvement is the introduction of Preflight, which will inspect the documents you scan and check for OCR errors.

It does this by analyzing the bitmap of the text and then inserting the words and characters it thinks are correct. If Acrobat Pro isn’t sure, it highlights the word as suspicious so you can easily review it and then manually check it yourself.

To use this feature, simply search for “Preflight” in the search toolbox in the top right corner of the interface. In the OCR preflight search bar, enter OCR and select Make OCR text visible.

Then just click on the Analyze and Repair button at the bottom.

After analysis, save the file and close the preflight tool.

Finally, open the Layers panel on the left to display the new layer. If you click the eye symbol to the left of the Invisible text, you can turn the layer on and off to compare and decide whether to keep the corrections suggested by Adobe Acrobat. Overall, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is still the most powerful PDF editing software for Mac when it comes to OCR conversion and editing of PDF format on Mac.

If you need to edit PDF documents after scanning, or sign and send them right away, there’s still no better app than Adobe’s Acrobat Pro DC.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC with its closest competitor, ABBYY FineReader Pro For Mac.

Acrobat Pro DC vs. FineReader Pro

 Adobe Acrobat Pro DCABBYY Finereader Pro
Available for MacYES YES *not Big Sur
Mac desktop appYESYES
Turn scanned documents into searchable PDFsYESYES
Accurate scanningYESYES
Quick ScanYESYES
PDF editing is allowedYESYES
Export PDFs to MS Office and other formatsYESYES
Preserve the original formattingYESYES
Batch OCR is supportedYESYES
Technical supportPhone/onlinePhone/online
E-book exportYESYES
Moving image integrationYESYES
Sign documents digitallyYES
Reduce file sizeYESYES
Educational discounts60% off Creative Cloud30% off
PriceUSD 14.99USD 85.00

Adobe Acrobat Pro itself costs $14.99 per month, but there are special commercial pricing plans for teams.

There’s also Adobe Acrobat Standard DC, which is slightly cheaper at $12.99 per month, but there’s no Mac version of the standard version – it’s only Windows.

However, if you use other Adobe products, you may find it more cost-effective to subscribe to the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite.

A subscription to Creative Cloud costs $52.99 per month, but includes access to all of Adobe’s industry-leading applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro.

For a limited time, students and educators can enjoy a 60% educational discount on the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite.

Adobe offers phone support and live chat support for Acrobat Pro. Since Acrobat Pro DC is a widely used product, there are also many useful user forums where you can find answers to almost any question.

Merit:

  • Excellent PDF editing and customization features
  • Integrate with the rest of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite
  • Full updates for the latest versions of macOS, including Monterey and Big Sur
  • Optimized for M1 Mac

Shortcoming:

  • Subscription pricing model

FineReader PDF for Mac (15% off)

Best OCR Scanning Software Collection: ABBYY FineReader PDF for Mac has been around for almost 20 years, although most of the time it was called ABBYY FineReader Pro.

With the release of macOS Big Sur, ABBYY improved the FineReader product line to create FineReader PDFs, although unfortunately it is only available for Intel Macs.

ABBYY FineReader PDF for Mac does work with the M1 Mac, but only through Rosetta, a type of software in macOS that converts Intel’s exclusive software to work with the M1 chip. There is no native M1 chip-compatible version of FineReader PDF for Mac.

Still, ABBYY FineReader PDF is one of the best desktop OCR tools for Mac and PC.

FineReader PDF has an accuracy rate of 99.8%, and while it depends on the quality of the original document, the OCR text recognition performance is excellent, easily making it the best on the market.

It is undoubtedly the fastest job when it comes to accurately identifying text and preserving the original formatting of scanned documents, including text size, font style, images, tables, and layout.

The FineReader PDF user interface is user-friendly and straightforward. To get started, simply select the source of the scan, and FineReader PDF will automatically detect the items that can be scanned.

You can choose from three different sources:

  • Mac Hardrive: PDFs, images, digital camera photos, or other documents that have been saved on your Mac. Alternatively, you can simply Ctrl-click on any file saved on your Mac and select Open With > ABBYY Finereader PDF from the drop-down menu.
  • Flatbed document scanner: If you need to digitize documents first, you can use a flatbed document scanner or a multifunction peripheral device (MFP), such as an all-in-one computer. Please note that FineReader PDF for Mac is only available on officially supported ICA-compatible devices on Mac, including the Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanner – it does not support TWAIN. If you’re in an office environment, you can also use a network scanner. You can find a list of official ICA compatible devices here.
  • Continuity Camera: This can be photos taken on your iPhone or iPad, including documents, receipts, and other notes you may have taken while on the go.

You can then choose to convert the document on your Mac to a searchable PDF PDF/A or an editable format, such as Microsoft Word (DOCX), Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (XSLX), or HTML web page format.

FineReader PDF for Mac also allows you to convert to Apple Pages, Apple Numbers, OpenOffice Writer (ODT), RTF, Powerpoint (PPTX), and eBook EPUB/FB2 formats. Note that if you know the password, it can only convert password-protected PDF documents.

eBook export is another useful feature because it allows you to read documents on iPad, Kindle, and other devices that support EPUB and FB2 formats.

FineReader PDF automatically detects the language being scanned, but you can choose to scan in 192 different languages or a mix of languages, including right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew.

The length of the document doesn’t matter because there is no word limit for scanning, although the longer the document, the longer it will take to scan.

It only takes a few seconds to scan a page, so even a document of hundreds of pages won’t take more than a minute or so.

FineReader PDF uses its proprietary ADRT (Adaptive Document Recognition Technology) scan engine that can detect everything from tables and headings to footnotes and page numbers.

This even includes native formatting properties, which means that the table can be easily updated or modified later, just like editing the original document.

However, to speed things up, if you don’t want to scan the entire document, you can highlight specific text or images on the page you want to scan.

This allows you to exclude specific page elements, such as page numbers, headers, footers, and images, so that you only get the original text.

Overall, Finereader PDF is very good at recognizing all types of fonts and digitizing them accurately. The accuracy of any OCR tool often depends on the quality of the original document, but Finereader PDF is excellent at detecting the quality of older and less than perfect text in a document.

For best results, ABBYY recommends using a grayscale/color mode with a resolution of 300 dpi and a font size of 10 or greater, as well as 400-600 dpi for smaller texts.

You can achieve almost 100% accuracy in a clear PDF document, but it can be much lower in other documents that are in poor condition or where the text is barely legible. However, like most OCR applications, FineReader PDF does not recognize handwritten content (which requires a different technology called ICR).

This level of accuracy means less time to manually edit or correct documents after the fact, which is often one of the biggest problems with OCR software.

When it comes to preserving the formatting and layout of the original document, FineReader PDF for Mac is undoubtedly the best we’ve tried. Once the scan is complete, Finereader PDF for Mac will highlight the detected text but display the document in its original form.

One of the most convenient features of ABBYY FineReader PDF for Mac is the ability to scan the photos you take on your phone. It’s ideal for archiving receipts and other documents when you get home or back to the office.

The app analyzes and corrects the image before scanning to ensure that the scanned text is as accurate as possible. Even blurry photos taken in low-light conditions (such as the magazine page below) are surprisingly good.

If you need to OCR a large number of documents on a regular basis, you can also use macOS Automator to automatically run OCR scans with FineReader PDF.

For example, you can specify a folder to drag and drop documents into that folder, which will automatically OCR scan documents at regular intervals.

Overall, when it comes to OCR accuracy, speed, format preservation, and converting formats, ABBYY FineReader PDF for Mac is one of the best we’ve tried.

The real test of OCR software is how well it handles low-quality documents or poorly lit images, and ABBYY FineReader PDF for Mac seems to be able to read exactly what you throw at it.

One major drawback is that ABBYY is very slow to update products for the latest version of macOS. It wasn’t until almost 6 months after the release and the release of FineReader PDF that ABBYY Finereader Pro was updated to work with Big Sur.

FineReader PDF is not currently available for macOS Monterey, and users may have to wait until 2022 to update.

For this reason, we also recommend buying directly from ABBYY, as you can get software updates faster than through the Mac App Store or other vendors. YOU CAN ALSO GET TOLL-FREE PHONE SUPPORT FROM ABBYY, WHICH IS ANOTHER BENEFIT COMPARED TO MOST PRODUCTS THAT ONLY OFFER ONLINE OR EMAIL SUPPORT.

It usually retails for $99.99, but for a limited time, ABBYY is currently offering a 15% discount on FineReader PDF for Mac, which means it’s priced at $85.00.

If you already have an earlier version of FineReader Pro for Mac, you can also get a 15% discount if you upgrade to FineReader PDF for Mac.

Merit:

  • Excellent accuracy and speed
  • Convert to edit PDF, Word, Excel, and more
  • Maintain the formatting of the original document
  • Performs well in low text quality or low light conditions

Shortcoming:

  • New versions of macOS are slow to update
  • Not compatible with macOS Monterey
  • Older TWAIN scanners are not supported
  • Doesn’t work natively on an Apple Silicon M1 Mac
  • Manually splitting, erasing, and renumbering pages is not supported

PDFpen

What are the best OCR scanning software? PDFpen is a powerful yet user-friendly PDF conversion and editing software that performs OCR scanning of documents on macOS.

PDFpen’s main focus is on PDF conversion and editing, not OCR, but PDFpen’s accuracy is still very good because it uses the excellent Kofax OmniPage OCR engine.

Since Kofax OmniPage is only available for Windows, PDFpen brings the OCR benefits of its technology to Mac users as well.

Note that if you’re scanning confidential documents, the PDFpen OCR engine is cloud-based, and all documents scanned in PDFpen will be uploaded to the Kofax OmniPage server.

When you open a PDF document in PDFpen, it automatically asks you if you want to perform an OCR scan and in which language.

Simply click on the “OCR Page” or OCR document to start scanning. Once the scan is complete, PDFpen will overwrite the text it has recognized, giving you a chance to edit any errors.

When you’re done, you can edit, annotate, search, copy, and paste text from your PDF document.

Alternatively, you can export the PDF to Microsoft Word DOCX format for editing.

To help optimize documents to improve OCR scanning accuracy, PDFpen also has a useful “Deskew and Adjust Image” tool that straightens images and adjusts image contrast and exposure.

Other useful features in PDFpen include the ability to digitally sign PDFs using a trackpad or mouse, scanning documents with an iPad or iPhone, and reordering and merging PDFs on a Mac.

PDFpen is generally fast, making it a great budget alternative to Adobe Acrobat Pro for those who often need to edit and convert PDF documents.

PDFpen costs $79.95, but there’s also PDFpen Pro for $129.95, which includes additional features such as Microsoft Excel export support, the ability to create and edit forms, and convert websites to PDF.

There’s also a PDFpen iOS app for $19.99, and while it’s more restrictive than the desktop app, it does allow you to sign documents on the go.

Please note that PDFpen support is only via email.

Merit:

  • Allows you to edit PDFs directly
  • Export to Microsoft Word

Shortcoming:

  • The OCR engine uploads documents online
  • The accuracy of the image is not very good
  • Not as powerful as Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
  • Export requires an upgrade to Pro

OCRKit

Mac OCR Scan Software Download: OCRKit is a serious, easy-to-use, and very effective open-source OCR tool that is also popular on Windows. Note that while OCRKit is based on open-source OCR technology, it is a commercial product that costs $39.99.

OCRK is ideal if you just want to convert PDFs to searchable PDF, RTF, HTML, or TXT documents. It’s easy to use, fast, and supports long documents and batch processing.

In addition to PDFs, you can also scan images in TIFF, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, PNM, BMP, PCX, GIF, and OpenEXR formats.

OCRKit supports batch OCR scanning via macOS Automator and its accuracy is excellent, regardless of the condition or resolution of the original document.

Using OCRKit couldn’t be easier. Simply drag and drop any PDF, TIFF, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, PNM, BMP, PCX, GIF, or OpenEXR document into the OCRKit Dock icon or interface and it will be ready to scan.

Select a file name to save the OCR document to:

OCRKit is surprisingly fast even when documents are longer than 100 pages, and within seconds, it displays searchable documents:

OCRKit has some other nice features. The auto-rotation tool can automatically detect the orientation of each document, so you don’t have to manually organize the previous stack of scans – very useful if you want to scan multiple documents that aren’t organized very well.

OCRKit also automatically detects most major languages, which is useful when you scan documents in more than one language.

Another useful feature is that OCRKit also integrates with Pages (Apple’s Microsoft Word alternative), which means you can drag your finished OCR document into Pages for editing. However, it does not apply to converting PDFs to edit in Microsoft Word.

If you’re looking for a simple, inexpensive, yet powerful Mac OCR tool that can preserve PDF format, OCRKit is an impressive tool.

OCRKit is priced at a very reasonable $39.99, which is excellent value for money considering the results you get.

Merit:

  • Decent OCR accuracy
  • Batch documentation is supported

Shortcoming:

  • Very basic interface
  • Does not export to MS Word

Readiris Pro

Readiris Pro is one of the most established OCR programs on the market. It was originally only available for Windows, but is now available on macOS under Canon’s new ownership.

Readiris is a powerful OCR app that scans an impressive 130 different languages. Scans with Readiris Pro are very accurate, but not as good as ABBYY on low-resolution documents.

It’s important to note that Readiris Pro doesn’t edit PDF documents.

However, you can choose to export the scan results directly to a variety of applications, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, DOCX, Pages, Numbers, Word, Excel, Evernote, Outlook, and even iTunes.

You can also convert OCR scans to audiobook AIFF and eBook formats.

The exported document also preserves the formatting very well, so it looks exactly like the original.

Although you can easily add or remove pages and drag and drop formats in any way you want, Readiris Pro struggled to find the right one at first.

You can also save OCR scan settings from one scan to the next so that you don’t have to constantly reconfigure it as you did in previous versions of the app.

Readiris also allows you to save documents to online services Box, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

There are 3 different versions of Readiris. The standard version costs $49 but doesn’t support basic features like batch processing, converting to other formats, and signing PDFs.

Priced at $99, Readiris Pro converts documents to different formats and allows you to modify documents in Word, Writer, and text documents, but can only import 50 pages at a time.

Readiris Corporate is a complete solution priced at $199 that allows unlimited bulk processing of documents, signing, and having a PDF/A solution for long-term archiving.

You can watch ReadIris Pro in action below.

Merit:

  • Very accurate scanning
  • Export to a wide range of applications
  • Good format preservation

Shortcoming:

  • An expensive Enterprise version is required to avoid scanning and conversion limitations
  • PDFs are not edited

Prizmo

Prizmo is a basic but very respectable OCR app for macOS. Prizmo does a particularly good job with black and white documents and can handle high-resolution images.

Thanks to an extensive neural network, Prizmo supports an impressive 23 different languages.

Although Prizmo supports multiple languages, you can only scan in one language mode, which can be a problem for those scanning non-English documents.

It’s also not very good at handling low-resolution articles, which is often one of the things that differentiates more expensive OCR software from budget alternatives like Prizmo. You’ll need to make sure that any documents scanned with Prizmo are above 200 dpi for acceptable results.

Prizmo supports Handoff, which means that if you take a photo of a document using the Prizmo iOS app for iPhone or iPad, you can access it directly in Prizmo, which is much more convenient than having to use a scanner.

Prizmo also has an OCR extension, which plugs into macOS and allows you to OCR any document or image you have open on your desktop directly from the Finder.

Prizmo is available in a standard version ($49.99) and a Pro version ($74.99). The Pro version offers more language support, OCR batch processing of multiple documents at once, Automator support, and custom export scripts. You can see more information about the differences here.

Prizmo has a free demo version, which has no time limit, but when you export the file, a watermark is installed and some characters from the business card are omitted.

You can also see how accurate you can get from Prizmo by looking at the results library.

Merit:

  • Includes voice support to read PDFs to you
  • Sync with iOS app for photo scanning

Shortcoming:

  • Accuracy may be compromised
  • Microsoft Office export is not supported

DEVONthink Pro

A collection of the best OCR scanning software: DEVONthink Pro (formerly DEVONthink Office) is aimed at those who want to go completely paperless from their home or office.

DEVONthink only makes software for Mac and iOS, so all of its products are tailored for macOS.

DEVONthink Pro is perfect for small businesses that want to automate OCR of everything that comes in and out to reduce paperwork.

The OCR engine in DEVONthink Pro is practically the same as the one used in ABBYY FineReader PDF for Mac. ABBYY licenses their OCR engine to integrate into other products, so in terms of accuracy, it is very similar to ABBYY.

All documents you upload to DEVONthink Pro Office, whether on Mac or iOS devices, are automatically synced and OCR scanned by DEVONthink Pro Office.

DEVONthink Pro Office intelligently archives your files based on the way you previously filed similar files. You can then search and retrieve these documents as easily as you would search and retrieve emails in your email client.

You can also manually label and group documents, so you can organize everything digitally better than piles of paper documents.

DEVONthink Pro Office is more of a document manager than a dedicated OCR solution, so there are fewer OCR features but a lot of document organization, synchronization, and archiving tools.

If your main purpose with OCR is to go paperless, DEVONthink Pro Office is a powerful solution that allows PDFs to search and organize your documents.

Note that DEVONthink Pro ($199) and Server ($499) are the only DEVONthink products with decent OCR features — the standard version doesn’t include OCR features.

DEVONthink Pro also includes a professional email archive and a web server for team collaboration. DEVONthink Pro for Mac support is available via email or support ticket, and there are also user forums.

You can check out the DEVONthink blog for ideas and ways DEVONthink Pro is being used to help individuals and businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.

There’s also a free trial version of DEVONthink Pro Office, so you can test drive it yourself.

Merit:

  • A great tool for going paperless at home or in the office
  • Sync with iOS apps

Shortcoming:

  • More focused on document organization than OCR

VueScan Pro

Do you have a document scanner, but the OCR software that comes with it doesn’t work well?

If so, VueScan Pro for Mac might be right for you. VueScan is a flatbed OCR software that works with almost all brands of new and used scanners. The default language of VueScan Pro is English, but you can download language packs for 32 other languages.

VueScan does a very rough job of scanning text in documents or images and dumping it into unformatted text files, but if you just need to extract text from scanned documents, it can do the job.

To create OCR text files with Vuescan, make sure you purchase the Pro version ($79.95) and not the Standard version ($39.95) that doesn’t support OCR.

Also make sure that your scanner is connected to your Mac and performing an OCR scan, make sure the Input tab is selected, and then change the Options field to Professional. Then in the “Output” tab, simply select “OCR Output File”.

Click “Scan” and then “View” to view the text of the output. The result won’t be perfect, and you’ll have a lot of cleanup to do, but it’s definitely faster than typing the entire document.

If you don’t mind formatting and just want to extract text from documents in a document scanner, VueScan Pro is an effective way to enhance the OCR capabilities of your document scanner.

Merit:

  • Enable your flatbed document scanner to recognize OCR documents
  • Extract text from a document

Shortcoming:

  • It is only used to dump text into a text file

PDF Reader Pro

What are the best OCR scanning software? PDF Reader Pro is a very popular PDF editing tool that can also OCR PDF documents.

If you need an OCR app with plenty of tools to edit PDFs, including annotating, editing, form-filling, converting, creating, signing, bookmarking, and securing PDFs, then it’s worth a try.

You can use PDF Reader Pro to do almost anything with PDFs, including merging multiple documents, splitting PDFs into multiple files, inserting pages from another PDF, and converting PDFs to Word and other Microsoft Office formats.

PDF Reader Pro does an excellent job of preserving the formatting of documents, including complex tables and bullets.

You can scan and convert 50 different languages and convert multiple documents in batches.

The premium version of PDF Reader Pro costs $59.99, which includes OCR scanning, but for Office exports, you’ll need to pay $79.99 to get a perpetual license.

Merit:

  • Edit, convert, and sign PDFs
  • Slick interface
  • Available in 50 languages

Shortcoming:

  • MS Office export support is more costly

Picatext

Mac OCR Scan Software Download: Picatext is an ultra-basic and inexpensive OCR app that simply scans and dumps text from images. For example, if you only want to extract text from screenshots, this is a very good option. But it doesn’t support PDFs.

Picatext is generally very good at extracting text from images or screenshots and supports more than 40 languages. However, it does have difficulties with low-resolution images and font styles like italics.

Picatext can only process one image at a time, making it ideal for one-off or occasional OCR scanning needs.

Simply drag and drop the document into Picatext or access it from the menu bar. If you select the menu bar option, Picatext displays a mini preview of the document and allows you to select all or part of the document to scan.

Alternatively, you can access Picatext via the hotkey combination TRL-CMD-ALT-P. Once done, any text extracted by Picatext is automatically copied to the clipboard.

For those who need an OCR app for images or screenshots on a very limited budget, Picatext is definitely worth checking out for just $3.99.

If you’re interested in other OCR text dump tools like Picatext, we also recommend checking out EasyScreenOCR For Mac.

Merit:

  • Good at extracting text from pictures
  • It’s quick and easy to use from the menu bar

Shortcoming:

  • PDFs are not supported
  • Very basic
  • Only for images

A collection of the best OCR scanning software for Mac

There are some free OCR solutions available to Mac users, but they aren’t great and mostly online.

One of the better ones is the open-source Tesseract project, which is a text recognition engine sponsored by Google.

Unfortunately, there is no official user interface, as it is primarily designed for programmers to integrate into their own applications and software, but there are also projects based on it, such as PDF OCR X.

Tesseract’s accuracy is excellent, but it can only dump text into a file, and like most free solutions, it doesn’t preserve the formatting of the document.

Does OmniPage Ultimate for Mac exist?

There is no version of Kofax Omnipage Ultimate on macOS, but we recommend Adobe Acrobat Pro DC as the best alternative to OmniPage Ultimate For Mac.

Why Should You Use OCR Scanning Software on Mac?

There are many reasons to use an OCR tool to make life easier. Here are some of the benefits of using the app presented here.

  • Save time: One of the main benefits is that it saves you a lot of time by not having to retype text saved in PDF documents or images, such as business cards, receipts, and bills. OCR technology has come a long way in recent years, and now the best apps can not only extract text from images and PDFs, but also preserve document formatting, layout, colors, and fonts. These OCR apps also allow you to take a photo of a document using your phone and then OCR it instantly using your Mac. These scans can be done in a matter of seconds instead of the tedious re-entry of pages of text. For example, educators can save a lot of time re-entering text and copying images from textbooks or converting paper materials into digital form for use in the classroom or sharing with colleagues.
  • Edit, update, scan, and extract text: OCR scanning allows you to “unlock” text in images or PDF files that you wouldn’t normally be able to edit. After conversion, you can edit or update, scan, and extract text from documents that were previously unachievable. When you’re done working on a document or image, you can search for it, copy and paste it into another document, or edit and fax it from your Mac. Professionals who can especially benefit from OCR utilities are those lawyers who have a large amount of documents and evidence that they need to be able to search and cite quickly, or academics who need to catalog and search for a large number of studies and studies.
  • Reduce paperwork: By creating an archive of PDF files that are ready to be searched and retrieved, you can go paperless from home or in the office. This improves organization and helps you find it faster without having to go through a lot of paperwork.
  • Create eBooks: If you want to read documents on the go on your Kindle or other e-book devices, many OCR programs allow you to export documents to ePUB or FB2 format.
  • Text-to-speech apps: After you scan documents, you can access them through text-to-speech apps and tools. If you want to search for keywords in a document, such as using Siri, you can use Just Say the Words and Find What You’re Looking for Faster.

OCR technology on Mac has come a long way.

If you need OCR scans and digital signatures for PDFs, and you’re already using other Adobe products, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is still the leader in the PDF market.

ABBYY FineReader PDF for Mac now produces results as good as the PC version and is a great OCR tool that improves accuracy, speed, formatting, and ease of use.

If you have any questions and queries or have any suggestions for any of the apps featured here, let us know in the comments below.

Thao Nguyen