What's The Best Free Ocr Software For Mac

Top 10 Best OCR Software for Mac for Easily Converting Images to Text January 4, 2013, There are times that you may need to copy or edit texts from a scanned document or a PDF file. However, this is not possible as these files are considered images. The texts cannot be selected, edited or copied. So you need to manually type them, which can be time consuming.

1. What's The Best Free Ocr Software For Mac Free
2. What The Best Free Ocr Software For Mac
3. Free Ocr Software For Mac

But this is no longer the case. You can use an OCR software for Mac to automatically convert an image to a text file. Here are some of the programs that you can use.

ABBYY FineReader Express Edition for Mac This program offers several features that make conversion and editing of PDF, scanned and image files easier. Even documents or files taken using a digital camera can be converted using FineReader. It offers high conversion accuracy as it does not just scans on the texts of the document, but also the images and tables. If you need to have the exact copy of the file but just needs to edit some of the texts; that will not be a problem with this software. It supports 171 languages so it can recognize the words even if they are not written in English. Aside from the option to convert the file into a word document, you also have the option to convert it into a spreadsheet, HTML or searchable PDF file.

All of these can be done in just one click. You don’t have to worry about accidentally saving the changes you made as it keeps a copy of the original file. DevonThink Pro Office DevonThink Pro Office is a document management program that offers easy way to organize all your files. This will make job easier for you as it will be faster to check on the documents you wish to find, as well as create a back up copy. It also has an OCR feature, which converts a scanned document into a text file. It actually uses ABBYY FineReader for converting the scanned files.

If you need a program that can help organize your documents while enjoying the convenience of an OCR program, this software is for you. ReadIris 12 ReadIris 12 is an accurate OCR software for Mac that can convert images or PDF files into editable text.

It supports conversion to over 30 formats including Word Document, Excel, HTM, e-mail and more. This can be done in just one click of the mouse.

Conversion is fast so you don’t have to wait for several minutes to get the converted file. It’s easy to use because of its user friendly interface. Furthermore, it allows you to immediately upload the files to any cloud including Google Docs and Dropbox so you can access them anywhere, anytime as long as you are connected to the Internet. VelOCRaptor With the simplicity of its interface, you can quickly learn how to use this program.

It does not require complicated steps to convert a scanned document into an editable PDF file. In fact, a simple drag and drop of the scanned file is all you need to have it converted. The software then scans and analyzes the document and converts it to text. You have the option to save it into a PDF file or you may also copy the texts and save them on a Word file or other word processing programs you wish to use.

It works with most scanners so you should not have a problem when it comes to scanning files. Adobe Acrobat 8 and Up Adobe Acrobat 8 and up come with a built in OCR feature that you can use to convert a scanned image into a searchable PDF file. Aside from the ability to search texts once the file is converted, it is also possible to copy them so you can save them on other applications including Excel, Word or e-mail.

The conversion can be done while the document is being scanned or by using an already scanned image. To convert a file that you are about to scan, open Adobe Acrobat, click File, choose Create PDF then select From Scanner. The Acrobat Scan window will appear. Click the box next to Make Searchable (Run OCR) to put a check mark and click Scan.

If you have a scanned image saved on your computer, open Adobe Acrobat, click File, choose Create PDF then select From File. Open the scanned image, then click Document, OCR Text Recognition then Recognize Text Using OCR. Evernote While Evernote is mainly used for organizing files like images, notes, PDF and other data, it also comes with an OCR feature. If you do not have a premium account, the OCR feature can be limited to extracting text files from images that you save on Evernote.

They are useful for easily searching specific pictures on your files. However, if you have a premium account, you will be able to run OCR on PDF files making the texts searchable and editable. VueScan This is mainly a program that is used for scanning as it supports more than 1850 scanners. If you cannot find the driver of your scanner or it is no longer supported by the manufacturer, you can still use it by installing VueScan on your computer. Scanned files can be saved in different formats including TIFF, JPEG and PDF.

Make the file searchable by using its OCR feature. As a beginner, you can use the Guide Me mode for help on the step by step process of using the program. When you have familiarized yourself with its use, you can try the Advanced mode and have access to more options. PDFPen PDFPen converts PDF files into searchable and editable format.

Aside from editing or copying the texts, you can also add images on the original file itself. When copying to another application, the format will be kept. Furthermore, it allows conversion of scanned images into text. Nuance OmniPage Depending on your needs, there is an Omnipage version that will work best for you.

If you are a professional and you need to use it for your job, you can get Omnipage Professional 18. If running a company, Omnipage Enterprise is the best option. For personal use, you can go with Omnipage Standard 18. It offers fast and accurate conversion and supports 123 languages. It keeps the format of the converted files and recognizes not only the texts, but other elements on the file like tables, forms and images. Prizmo This programs offers scanning, OCR, image enhancement, as well as the ability to share files on the Cloud network.

Whether it is a scanned file or a picture, convert it to text file so you can easily copy or edit the text. It supports more than 40 languages so you can be assured that conversion is more accurate. Choose from any of the OCR software for Mac you would like to install on your computer. Converting scanned and PDF files into text will be faster and easier by using one of these programs.

6 Responses. PDF Studio Pro is an affordable alternative to Adobe Acrobat on the Mac.

Version 8 added an OCR function. Give it a try. There is a free demo version available for evaluation. The software runs on Mac, Windows and Linux and one license key allows to install the software on up to 2 machines regardless of the operating system. Paris Page OCRKit?

It is is cheap (got it for $40 in the AppStore) and it works great, got much better recognition results than Prismo,. Ilya Strelkov Recently ABBYY has updated their OCR software for Mac. Now you can get Professional version of their OCR for the old price of Express ($99.99). May The 10 free OCR software you suggest are great for me. I heard of them before, but I did not use it. I am using Yunmai Document Recognition, a document reader developed by Yunmai Technology.

It is able to extract the text from an image of a document, and then save it as text file. This software is a demo of Yunmai Document Recognition OCR SDK. The average time for recognition of a document less than 6 seconds. The recognition accuracy can reach 99%.

朱燕华 Thanks for your suggestions. They are helpful for me. When choosing OCR software, I always think about the recognition accuracy and recognition speed. As I know, Yunmai Technology is also very professional on OCR technology. Yunmai Document Recognition is really great for me. The average time for recognition of a document less than 6 seconds. The recognition accuracy can reach 99%.

It can convert documents into PDF, Word, Text format files. JRyder Thanks for this roundup although this article is a bit dated now.

What's The Best Free Ocr Software For Mac Free

There are now plenty of very accurate OCR software for Mac. Here’s a few of them if it helps anyone.

What The Best Free Ocr Software For Mac

PDFs offer a lot of advantages over other file types, but being easy to work with generally isn’t one of them. What makes working with PDFs difficult is that they look familiar, but because PDFs are essentially images, they are much more restrictive. This can make editing them extremely aggravating when you know exactly what change you want to make, but your software won’t cooperate.

Fortunately, there are a couple of great tools available for the Mac that make working PDFs a much more pleasant experience. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best options available and crown our favorite:.

Evaluation Criteria In selecting the best PDF editor for Mac, we used the following criteria in selecting the winner:. Overall Design — Working with PDF files is hard enough as it is. The PDF editor you choose should provide a clean user interface with features that are easy to understand and use so you can complete your work quickly.

Viewing Speed — While much emphasis is placed on the ability to edit PDF files, equally as important is the ability to quickly find the areas you want to change. This can be slow and cumbersome if your PDF editor doesn’t provide a pleasant reading experience.

Annotations — Most PDF editing tasks require annotating documents and sending them back to your clients or coworkers, so the PDF editor you use should allow you to mark up your PDF files quickly and easily. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — The ability to apply Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) is extremely important as it takes an image that looks like text and converts it to actual, computer-readable text. This allows you to search for (and depending on the app, even edit) text in your PDF files much like you would in a word processor. Additional Editing Features — Depending on your use case, you might need additional features that are only available in some higher-end (read: expensive) PDF editors. These features can either be completely unnecessary or essential to your workflow depending on your work.

Sharing & Exporting Options — Once you have your PDF file ready to go, you need to be able to share it easily. In addition to sharing the PDF file itself, you might need to open the file in an external application. The PDF editor you choose should be able to send your file to other applications easily. Price — The price range for PDF editors is very broad, ranging from free to hundreds of dollars. You need to consider price when balancing what a specific PDF editor offers against your individual PDF editing needs. Power user features may be nice to have, but if you aren’t going to use them very often, the extra cost may not be worth it for you.

The Paperless Cheatsheet Get your copy of this free quick-start guide to going paperless. From apps to scanners, discover everything you need to go paperless at home or the office. Our Favorite PDF Editor: PDFpen is a functional, powerful PDF editor. While the user interface isn’t the best of the apps we tested, it’s generally easy to use and makes up for a lack of polish with powerful features to meet even the most rigorous demands of PDF power users. There are lots of workflows that are possible in PDFpen, but we’ve looked at some common ones to show the power and flexibility packed into this program. Annotations Annotations in PDFpen are fairly straightforward. To highlight text in your PDF, just select Highlight from the tool bar, pick your color, then select the text you want to highlight.

To add a note or comment to your PDF, select the appropriate options from the Tools menu. Notes can be minimized and display a text bubble icon in the document that you can click to expand, and comments are displayed as text on top of the page. You can also add shapes to your PDF document if you want. To do this, select the Shapes icon from the toolbar, select the type of shape you want, and then drag it into your document.

Once you have your shape, you can easily select a new color, line format, or line thickness from the toolbar. PDFpen also has a library of proofreading marks you can use to mark up your document. To access these, go to Window → Library and click the Proofreading Marks icon.

When you’re done annotating your document and you want to print it, you can click Show Details from the Print menu to select whether you want to include comments, notes, or both. Signing Documents Signing PDF documents is another common editing task. This takes a little bit of prep work in PDFpen, but once you have it set up you can easily reuse your signature by saving it to your library. To do this, you first need to sign your name and scan it to your Mac.

Once you have the file, you can drag it into PDFpen, but you’ll see that the image file will have a background that obstructs whatever the signature is sitting on top of (usually it’s white). You can make the background transparent by going to Edit → Make Transparent Image. This will open a popup with an eyedropper tool where you can select the background color that you want to make transparent. Once you select the background color and click Make Transparent, you’ll have a signature that you can drag to the appropriate place in the document and resize by dragging one of the corners. Once you have your signature ready, you can save it for re-use. You can do this by going to Window → Library to make sure the Library window is open, then go to the Library window and select the + icon, and click Add Selected Imprint to save the transparent signature image to your Library.

Applying OCR Optical Character Recognition is extremely important when dealing with PDF files as it allows the computer to identify the text contents of your document. Without it, all it sees is a bunch of pixels, which means you can’t do anything that involves text selection (i.e. Copy & paste) and you won’t be able to search your document and find a selected word or phrase. This is one area PDFpen really shines as it is incredibly easy to apply OCR to a document.

In fact, when you open a PDF file in PDFpen that it thinks is scanned, a dialog box will appear and ask you if you’d like to apply OCR to a particular page or to the entire document. You can even select from multiple languages. Redacting Text Occasionally you’ll need to share PDF documents that contain text you don’t want others to be able to see (like address, telephone number, etc.).

PDFpen has you covered there too, as it allows you to find and redact text to hide personal or sensitive information. To redact text in PDFpen, first click the Find button in the toolbar and type in the text you want to redact. You’ll see all the instances of that text appearing in the document in the box below your search term. Next, click Find in the dropdown menu and select Redact. Finally, select the instance you want to redact from the list and click Redact. If you want to redact all instances of the text, you can also click Redact All to redact them all at once.

Free Productivity Guide: Download our simple guide to productivity to help you improve your workflows and be more focused with your time and attention. Exporting to Microsoft Word (or other word processors) Let’s say you get a contract from someone that you want to edit. Frequently these documents are sent as PDF files specifically because it makes it harder to make changes, but PDFpen’s export to Microsoft Word feature makes this easy as well. All you have to do is click File → Export and select the desired file format. This will allow you to easily edit the text in the document and you can then export back to PDF by clicking File → Print and selecting Save as PDF. Additional Features If your PDF needs extend beyond the scope of the standard PDFpen application, you can also check out PDFpen Pro, which includes the following additional features:.

Turn websites into PDFs. Create and edit forms. Export to Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF/A. Add and edit permissions.

Create and edit Table of Contents. Create links from URLs PDFpen is availabe for $75 on the Smile software website, and PDFpen Pro is $125 if you need the additional features. Runner Up: PDF Expert by Readdle Software is an excellent application with one major flaw: It doesn’t have the ability to add OCR to your PDF files. This is absolutely critical when editing PDF files, so the lack of this single feature is unfortunately a dealbreaker for a lot of people.

For a lot of PDF-based tasks, PDF Expert is fine. It offers a blazing fast PDF reading experience, and has very good annotation tools. It also offers the tools to edit, merge, and sign documents as well as fill forms. Once you’re done editing your PDF file, PDF Expert integrates fully with the Mac share sheet so you can send it to any application that accepts PDFs. It does all of this with a beautiful user interface and a price tag ($59.99) that is on par with the other PDF editors we looked at.

Free Ocr Software For Mac

If you’re a student, you can even snag a small when purchasing directly from Readdle. Other Options. — Adobe actually created the PDF file format back in 1991, so you might think that Adobe Acrobat Pro would be the hands-down favorite for the best PDF editor for Mac. While it’s true that Adobe Acrobat Pro is an extremely powerful PDF editor, it’s also incredibly expensive.

It’s available via subscription for $15/month or as part of the Creative Cloud suite ($49/month), and is also available as a stand-alone product for $449. In our opinion, Adobe Acrobat Pro is not as easy to use as PDFpen Pro, and the incredibly high price is not justified unless you really need some Adobe-only features or already have a Creative Cloud subscription. Preview — Preview is the default PDF editor that comes bundled with Mac OS X, and is actually a pretty decent tool for basic PDF editing tasks.

Depending on your needs, Preview might be enough for you. For example, you can make basic annotations, reorder pages, and even sign documents in Preview. But in our testing, annotations made in Preview sometimes didn’t display correctly in other PDF editors, and if you work with PDFs frequently, you’ll soon hit the limit of what Preview is capable of. Preview is “fine” for occasional PDF editing, but for anything more you’re going to want a more powerful PDF editor in your arsenal. Everything Else – A quick internet search will show that there is no shortage of PDF editing software options, but many of them look like they haven’t been updated since before 2008 when Adobe released the PDF file format as an open standard per ISO 32000-1, and most lack even basic features that are present in Preview. Even if these companies are legit (and a lot of them aren’t), it’s not worth your time to look here. If you’re looking for a cheap/free PDF editor for basic PDF editing, try Preview first.

Conclusion If you’re looking to edit PDFs on your Mac, quality options are hard to come by, and is the cream of the (very limited) crop. PDFpen offers enough features to complete just about any standard PDF editing task quickly and easily, and offers a Pro version for those who need the extra features. If you don’t work with PDFs regularly or don’t need all the bells and whistles that PDFpen offers, PDF Expert offers a great user interface for basic edits and is probably powerful enough for most people at a much lower price point.