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HP Easy Scan is designed specifically for use with your HP scanner or multifunction printer. With features such as automatic photo detection, multi-page document processing, text recognition (OCR)[1], and PDF file output, HP Easy Scan will help you get the most value from your HP product.
If you have a big pile of documents and receipts that you need to digitize, these scanners are the quickest way to get the job done. But you might want one for other reasons too:. Reduces clutter: This may be the digital age, but a frustrating variety of documents still come exclusively on paper, and many of them need to be kept for years according to state and federal laws. Creating digital copies means you can stay in compliance without drowning in a sea of paper.
Makes documents easier to find: Since portable document scanners use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to turn printed text into searchable text, you can do word searches to find exactly the document you need in seconds. That’s a lot better than spending an afternoon digging through dusty filing cabinets. Scans are harder to misplace than paper: Even if you’re diligent about sorting and filing your receipts and tax forms, there’s always the chance you’ll inadvertently toss something out during a move or spring cleaning. It’s a lot harder to accidentally discard digital copies, especially when you’ve backed them up to a cloud storage account. Easy to stow away: You probably won’t scan every day, which is why it’s great that these machines are designed to fold down into an even more compact profile for storage and travel.
Stationary desktop scanners are faster, but they take up more space on a desk, and you can’t easily toss them in a drawer until the next time you need them. If you already own a portable document scanner and like it well enough, you probably have little reason to upgrade. Scanner development moves at a snail’s pace, and models often stay on shelves for as many as four or five years between revisions. That said, if your current scanner doesn’t offer Wi-Fi, can’t scan both sides of a document at once, scans significantly slower than you’d like, or doesn’t reliably recognize text, give our pick a look. If you have an all-in-one printer with a flatbed scanner and an automatic document feeder, you should think about buying a portable document scanner only if you find that you often need to scan when you’re away from home. Portable document scanners aren’t more accurate than all-in-ones and don’t produce noticeably better OCR results.
Can’t you just use a phone? Photo: Rozette Rago Portable document scanners are simple devices: They scan documents and deliver digital files. But there are a few boxes they need to check in order to be worth your time and money, so we prioritized these qualities when surveying the available models.
Usability: If you hate using your scanner, you’re not going to use it. The hardware interface needs to be easy to navigate, and the desktop and mobile software should be powerful enough to get the job done but not so complex that it gets in your way when you’re working under pressure.
OCR: A good portable document scanner should be able to accurately recognize printed text via OCR and turn it into a searchable PDF. The best portable document scanners can also export the text as an editable document, either in DOC, RTF, or TXT format. Ideally, a good scanner accurately recognizes every character, but realistically we expect a success rate of above 90 percent. Wi-Fi: Just a few years ago, Wi-Fi was a rarity in portable document scanners. Today it’s commonplace. Being able to run your scanner without a USB cable is a nice perk, especially if the scanning speed isn’t any slower. Duplex scanning: Being able to scan both sides of a two-sided document in a single pass drastically reduces the amount of time it takes to scan large documents.
The feature also reduces wear and tear on both the original documents and the scanner itself. Automatic document feeder: Speaking of large documents, you don’t want to stand there and feed your scanner dozens of pages one by one. With an automatic document feeder (ADF), you can slide the whole stack into a slot and let the machine work its magic. Portability: It’s right there in the name. Portable document scanners actually span a broad range of sizes and especially weights—from under 1 pound to well over 3 pounds. Although machines with ADFs tend to be on the heftier side, we think a feeder is important enough to make the extra pounds worth it.
Any model around 3 pounds or less is okay in our books. Speed: The best portable document scanners operate at around the same speed—about 25 pages per minute—but all else being equal, we prefer a faster one. Diverse power options: The fewer accessories you need to carry with your scanner, the more portable it is. Most scanners today can run on either USB or a typical AC adapter, so if you want to travel light, all you need is a USB cable.
Some include built-in batteries, so they can operate in a truly wireless fashion: no USB cable, no power brick, not even a laptop. It’s certainly a nice feature to have, but one we think most laptop owners can do without. With these features in mind, we considered the full range of portable document scanners currently available from top brands like Brother, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu, Visioneer, and Xerox, immediately ruling out bulky desktop models that didn’t collapse for storage and transport.
In total, we found nine available portable (with ADF) models and 12 ultraportable (without ADF) models. In the end, we decided to test our reigning picks, the Epson ES-200 and Epson ES-300W, head-to-head with a pair of new portable document scanners from Brother, the ADS-1250W and ADS-1700W. When it came to ultraportable scanners, our choice was easy: Only one model, the Brother DSMobile 920W, offered the combination of features we thought most people would be seeking. How we tested. To begin, we unboxed each scanner, taking notes on their size, weight, and build quality. Did the plastics seem thick and durable?
Were the ADF guides sturdy when extended? Did the feeder tray latch solidly when we folded it down for storage? We also checked to see whether the manufacturer bothered to include a USB cable or other extras in the box.
Once the physical setup was complete, we installed the scanners on Mac and Windows computers, plus Android and iOS phones, taking note of any obvious pain points in either finding or using the software. We performed all installations over Wi-Fi, except in the case of our previous pick, the Epson ES-200, which is USB-only. However, we made sure to check that USB scanning also worked without a hitch on the Wi-Fi–enabled scanners. To evaluate OCR capability, we scanned both an (PDF) and a simple text document with the same sentence repeated in descending font size from 12 to 4 points, exporting the results as both searchable PDFs and (where possible) editable text files. To check image quality, we scanned several other documents, including a, a (ISO) meant to mimic a typical office report, and a couple of photos printed on regular copy paper. We compared the 300 dpi scans with both the original prints and scans we made using the flatbed scanner on an average inkjet all-in-one.
We don’t recommend using a portable document scanner to archive photos—we suggest using our for that—but we also used each model to scan a glossy color print just to see if the results were good enough for email and social media. To test scan speed, we ran a 20-sheet double-sided business document through each scanner using both simplex and duplex modes, over both USB and (except in the case of the Epson ES-200) Wi-Fi, and at both 300 dpi and 600 dpi resolution. In each case, we recorded how long the scan job took to complete, from pressing the scan button until the results were ready to be saved. Most document scanners are rated for everything from flimsy copy paper to heavy card stock, but we fed each machine a variety of paper types to make sure it could handle them. We also intentionally jammed each scanner just to see how easy or difficult it was to clear.
Finally, we ran a series of tests to gauge the effect that different power sources had on scanner performance. For instance, we attempted to quantify the effect that scanning via USB power had on laptop battery life, and also to see whether scanning slowed noticeably on USB power. We also checked to see if the machines would operate using a as a power source. Along the way, we took notes on Wi-Fi reliability and any other glitches we might encounter in daily use. Our pick: Brother ADS-1250W. The is the best portable document scanner you can buy because of how easy it is to use compared with its closest rivals.
Brother’s software provides ample control and puts the most important settings at your fingertips. The ADS-1250W’s Wi-Fi connection is stable, and it can work over Wi-Fi with third-party scanning apps like Windows Scan and Apple’s Image Capture. OCR performance is excellent, and it scans just as quickly as any other scanner in this category. Although it lacks a battery, a feature some other scanners in this class offer, it can operate via USB power at a slower scan speed. We think that’s an acceptable trade-off for most people.
The ADS-1250W’s document feeder folds down when it’s not in use, making the machine easier to store or transport. Video: Rozette Rago Installation is simple, regardless of platform. Brother ships the ADS-1250W with a CD containing the install files, but since our test computers didn’t have optical disc drives we downloaded the same software from. The install process is essentially identical on Windows 10 and macOS Mojave—the only real difference is that Windows users get licenses for two extra programs from Nuance: Power PDF (for PDF editing) and PaperPort (for document organization). Although the ADS-1250W doesn’t have a touchscreen interface like the slightly more expensive, we found it easy enough to connect via Wi-Fi by following the included instructions.
Brother’s software is much more enjoyable to work with than the apps that come with other scanner brands we tested. The core scanning suite, Brother iPrint&Scan, is simple and straightforward. Once you’ve selected your scanner, you can adjust vital settings such as document size, color settings, resolution, and duplexing before hitting a big, bright green Scan button.
The default scanning apps from other brands require you to click through a series of submenus to get to the same options. Once your scan job is finished, iPrint&Scan shows you the results, lets you reorder pages, and invites you to save the resulting document. If you want to save your scan in multiple formats, you can do that without having to rescan the pages for each file type. The ADS-1250W is nearly as wide as a MacBook Air and weighs almost exactly as much. Photo: Rozette Rago In our tests, OCR results from the ADS-1250W were great across the board. When we scanned challenging mixed-format documents like the IRS 1099 form at 300 dpi, it missed only a couple of words, limited to those printed in very small fonts, in particularly squiggly fonts, and on darker backgrounds.
Line breaks, especially on multicolumn documents such as the 1099 form, are a problem for any scanner, but the ADS-1250W handled them as well as any other model we’ve tested. With our descending-font document, the ADS-1250W was accurate 100 percent of the time at 6 points and larger, with both serif and sans serif fonts and at both 300 and 600 dpi. Accuracy dropped off with 4-point type but stayed above 90 percent at 300 dpi and above 98 percent at 600 dpi. The ADS-1250W was more accurate than other scanners we tested at almost every font size, in both styles, and at both resolutions (though the differences were not huge). Text scans from the Brother ADS-1250W (left) were crisp but not oversharpened, making them easier to read. The Epson ES-300W (right) produced comparably oversharpened and overly contrasty text. When scanning our photo, the ADS-1250W produced acceptably crisp results with accurate color and contrast.
However, the rollers that pull sheets through the scanner can easily scratch the coating on glossy and matte photo paper, which essentially ruins the originals. If you really want to scan photos, consider a dedicated photo scanner like; it produces far better results and won’t damage your prints. If you already have an all-in-one printer, the flatbed scanner on that machine will probably produce comparable photo scans and won’t scratch the finish. The ADS-1250W’s Wi-Fi performance was mediocre overall but still better than what we got from its rivals. Its signal was consistently weaker than that of other wireless devices positioned near it (such as our test laptops and phones), but despite showing only one bar, its connection never failed during scanning. We don’t advise trying to use this scanner too far from your router, but within reasonable limits it should prove reliable. The ADS-1250W isn’t just accurate, it’s also quick—roughly as speedy as the Epson models when scanning via USB and noticeably faster over Wi-Fi when using the manufacturer-provided apps.
In our testing, the ADS-1250W took 48 seconds to scan 20 single-sided test pages via USB, which works out to a rate of 25 pages per minute. Over Wi-Fi, on the same task it clocked 52 seconds, or 23 pages per minute.
In comparison, the Epson ES-300W managed 25.5 ppm over USB but slowed to 16.5 ppm via Wi-Fi. Since Brother offers an ICA driver, the ADS-1250W can also work over Wi-Fi with third-party scanning apps in macOS—something Epson’s scanners can’t do. We found that although the ADS-1250W can indeed handle everything from copy paper to heavy card stock and plastic IDs, it will jam if you don’t load your documents in exactly the right way.
A large sticker on the document feeder shows you how to do it: Fan the sheets so that the first page goes deepest in the feed slot and the last page is farthest out, and then gently slide them into the slot. It takes a bit of experimentation, but once you have the feel, your jam rate will drop to almost zero. All of the scanners we tested were just as picky, so this issue isn’t limited to our pick. In addition to scanning to a computer and mobile devices, the ADS-1250W can scan to a USB thumb drive (the scanner has a port on the back side). If you need additional scan-to options, such as FTP and network folders, consider the otherwise similar. Flaws but not dealbreakers. The ADS-1250W is slightly bigger and heavier than the other scanners we tested at 11.8 by 4.1 by 3.3 inches and 3 pounds.
(It’s about the size of a footlong sub and the weight of an old-school MacBook Air.) But we think that’s an acceptable trade-off considering all the things this Brother model does well. If you place a much higher value on portability, you might want to consider. Since the ADS-1250W doesn’t have a battery, you have to operate it via USB or AC power. That means that if you travel with your scanner, you’ll need to carry a USB 3.0 cable (not included) or an AC power brick and cable (included).
We don’t think either accessory will weigh you down too much, but these calculations are always very personal. (We tried powering it via a USB battery pack with both 12 W and 18 W outputs, but although the scanner’s power LED turned on, the machine wouldn’t operate.) When running on USB power, the ADS-1250W’s scanning speed slows significantly: Whereas it took just 49 seconds to scan 20 pages at 300 dpi using AC power, it took 2 minutes, 57 seconds to do the same task using USB power. This is one area where a battery-equipped competitor like the Epson ES-300W has a clear advantage, as in our tests that model completed the same task in 47 seconds on both battery and AC power.
When using USB power, the ADS-1250W is also incapable of scanning to a USB drive or scanning long paper such as banners or some longer receipts. During the course of testing, we changed the Wi-Fi password in our Los Angeles office. Most devices in the office handled the transition just fine, but the ADS-1250W struggled. Since the scanner has no screen, we couldn’t update the password on the machine itself, and the default Brother apps didn’t provide a way to change it, either.
We tried downloading Brother’s optional Remote Setup app, but it was also unable to rectify the situation. In the end, we found the most efficient, least frustrating way to set up the scanner on a new network was to redownload and run the full installer package, since it includes a network setup wizard. For this reason, we suggest keeping the installer package somewhere handy on your computer’s hard drive. Although the ADS-1250W produces more accurate OCR results than the competition, Brother iPrint&Scan can export those results only as TXT and RTF files. Other scanners, such as the Epson ES-300W, can also export Microsoft Word DOC files with more advanced formatting. However, this is an extremely minor complaint—especially since the formatting in OCR-produced DOC files usually needs so much cleanup that it’s almost easier to paste in the plain text and format it from scratch. The mobile version of Brother iPrint&Scan gets the job done for basic tasks, but its features are pretty limited.
You can change only the document size, color settings, and duplexing. It offers no OCR, so you’re limited to image-only PDFs and JPEGs at 100 to 300 dpi, depending on color and speed settings. You can send these PDFs to a third-party app for OCR or upload them to the cloud and convert them later using PC software, but it would have been nice if Brother had included this functionality in its own app.
Unfortunately, leaving OCR out of mobile apps is more or less the industry standard. Finally, we have to call Brother out for not including a USB cable in the box. If you don’t already have one, grab an inexpensive Micro-USB 3.0 cable with a Micro-B connector like. Runner-up: Brother ADS-1700W. If our main pick is unavailable, or if you must have a touchscreen, you can go with the, a model virtually identical to the ADS-1250W. It uses the same software, produces the same scan quality, generates the same OCR results, and scans at the same speed. It also tends to cost more.
Well, it has a 2.8-inch color touchscreen LCD, for one thing. For another, it can scan to FTP and email servers, network drives, and cloud storage services in addition to your phone, your computer, and USB thumb drives. The ADS-1700W’s small touchscreen isn’t great, but it is something that no other portable document scanner we tested has.
Photo: Rozette Rago The ADS-1700W’s touchscreen will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used a cheap printer in the past few years. It’s small, low-resolution, and resistive (meaning you have to press hard to get it to recognize touches). It gets the job done, but it’s not exactly fun to use.
However, it does allow you to do a few things you can’t do on our top pick, such as upload scans directly to the cloud and log on to your Wi-Fi network via the scanner itself. If you’re uncomfortable with network setup in general, the ADS-1700W is also capable of Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), which makes getting online as easy as pressing a button on the touchscreen and another on your router. This model is also slightly more future-proofed, since it is. Upgrade pick: Epson FastFoto FF-680W. If you want a document scanner that can also handle photos without destroying them, the is the best choice. Unlike our top pick, it doesn’t bend photos as they pass through the scanner, so it won’t leave scratches and other unsightly marks on the originals. It can produce high-resolution photo scans at a rate of about 1.5 seconds per shot and can scan a wide variety of sizes, including Polaroids.
However, it’s much less portable and much more expensive than our top pick, so we recommend it only if you have a large number of photos that need scanning. Scanners like this are great because they can bring your old photos into the digital age and save you from the mind-numbing labor of manually scanning each one with a flatbed scanner.
With its automatic feeder, the FF-680W can scan batches of up to 36 photos, and it accepts photos ranging from wallet-sized to 5 by 7 inches. If you feed them one at a time, it can also handle 8-by-10-inch shots and up to 8.5-by-36-inch panoramas.
It also captures the handwritten notes on the backside of photos in a single pass. The FF-680W scans photos without bending them, preventing damage to older prints and delicate finishes. Video: Rozette Rago At typical price around $600, the FF-680W’s considerable firepower doesn’t come cheap. If you don’t have a huge number of photos and don’t expect to produce more in the future, it would probably be more economical to use one of our recommended to archive your memories. Our numbers suggest you’d need to scan about 1,500 photos for owning the FF-680W to make more sense than outsourcing. But the FF-680W isn’t just a photo scanner—it’s also a very capable document scanner.
In our tests it was much faster than our top pick, chewing through a 20-page two-sided office document in just 29 seconds via USB, or a rate of around 41.5 pages per minute. Its document feeder can handle an impressive 100 sheets of copy paper.
And unlike the Epson ES-300W, it also worked with third-party apps over a wireless connection thanks to its built-in ICA driver. However, it’s still saddled with Epson’s ScanSmart software, which we don’t like as much as Brother’s more intuitive and user-friendly iPrint&Scan. If you want a scanner primarily for scanning documents, we suggest going for our top pick. But if you want a scanner mostly for photos and also need to scan documents occasionally, the FF-680W will work well.
Although the FF-680W is bulkier than our top pick, it collapses for storage—an improvement over the older FF-640. Video: Rozette Rago Installation is simple through the installer from. We had no issues getting our test unit onto our office Wi-Fi network, and the USB connection was flawless on both Windows and Mac.
Epson’s FastFoto software both scans and organizes your photos. You can tag each batch with descriptive text and the time period in which the photos were taken, and the app then uses the info to create a template for file names. It can also auto-populate subfolders for each time period, apply automatic image enhancement, and scan back-side notes (saving the second file with a “b” at the end of the name and grouping the fronts and backs together in the app). You can save images as either lossy JPEGs or uncompressed TIFF files, but you have to choose before you scan—you can’t save to both formats in a single pass.
And since everybody lives in the cloud now, the FastFoto app can automatically upload new scans to popular storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. The FF-680W’s larger body has plenty of room for physical controls and status LEDs, but no LCD. Photo: Rozette Rago Our photo scans from the FF-680W looked very good, with accurate color reproduction and plenty of detail. Hardcore photo enthusiasts will want to stick with their high-end flatbed scanners, but the average shutterbug will be more than pleased with these results.
FastFoto’s auto-enhancement feature makes faded photos pop, which is fine for social sharing, but it destroys detail with excessive contrast and sharpening. If you want to preserve your photos for long-term archival, we suggest turning that feature off and using an external editing suite like Photoshop to make your own tweaks.
Auto-cropping and de-skew were generally very accurate for us, though they sometimes left white borders on photos with rounded corners and failed to correct skew on the back side of photos. What about ultraportable scanners?
You might be wondering why we haven’t included an even smaller and lighter scanner without a document feeder. We surveyed the available ultraportable options in the lead-up to testing and found that only one such model, the, appeared to have all of the features we considered most desirable: Wi-Fi connectivity, duplex scanning, and a built-in battery. Unfortunately, we found that despite its promising specs, the DS-920DW was a nightmare to use.
The included Brother DSMobileCapture software is ancient (the Windows version is also partially broken in Windows 10), and the Miwand mobile app isn’t much better. (The materials that come with the scanner actually reference a different mobile app that no longer exists.) The bundled OCR software can’t be downloaded; it’s available only on the optical disc that comes with the scanner, which is a real problem in an age when most laptops no longer have disc drives.
The DS-920DW produced good-looking scans for us, but we don’t think saving a couple of pounds over our top pick justifies all the headaches. The competition. Our top pick’s primary competitor is the.
The ES-300W has some real advantages over our pick, such as added power options, speedier performance when not on AC power, and a lighter, more compact design. But it’s also much less reliable and generally less enjoyable to use. The Wi-Fi is flaky, and it doesn’t work with non-Epson apps if you have a Mac. That might be okay if Epson’s own software were great, but it’s not. The default Epson ScanSmart app buries important settings in submenus, and the Epson Scan 2 alternative doesn’t let you review your documents post-scan to rearrange the order or rescan specific pages if something goes wrong. The offers a comprehensive, well-integrated suite of scanning software, but that is its only real advantage.
Its document feeder can handle just half the sheets our top pick can, it scans half as fast (and drops to a truly glacial pace of around 4 pages per minute on USB power), and it uses separate USB cables for data and power, so you’ll have to carry two cables with you. Fujitsu also doesn’t provide TWAIN or ICA drivers, so you’re limited to using the company’s own software. If you already own and are satisfied with the S1300i, upgrading is probably not worthwhile. But if you’re buying your first document scanner, you have better choices. The is slower and less accurate than our top pick and doesn’t offer Wi-Fi. You can theoretically buy a separate Wi-Fi adapter and battery pack dongle at the eye-popping price of $170, but it’s out of stock everywhere and brings the total cost of the machine to near $400, which is just outrageous. We considered but didn’t test the and, which are identical scanners sold under different brand names.
They lack Wi-Fi, claim a scan speed of just 15 pages per minute (compared with 25 ppm for our pick), and are slightly bigger than the ADS-1250W, yet cost more. The lacks Wi-Fi and a battery, which makes it a little smaller and lighter than the otherwise identical ES-300W. Unfortunately, most of its competitors now offer wireless connectivity, and its $250 list price is higher than our top pick’s. The value just isn’t there anymore. We dismissed Doxie scanners like the because although they’re cheap, compact, and popular with some of our readers, they don’t offer duplex scanning. That’s a dealbreaker for us, especially since the Q is capable of scanning just 8 pages per minute.
Further reading.
Do PDF OCR. Things You Need to Know about OCR Mac?
What Does OCR Stand For? OCR (Optical Character Recognition), it is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping system in an office, or to publish the text on a website.Without OCR, or to be specific, without Mac OCR software, the scanned PDF cannot be recognized by comuper, hence not allow you to edit or search. Though there are some free tools coming with MacOS for users to deal with PDF files, like Preview and Automator, mac ocr service is not availble. Preview Can Not Do OCR on Scanned PDF Preview can help view and manage and edit PDF files on mac, but the editing feature is only limited to native PDFs. Though you can surely open scanned pdf in Preview, it is displayed as image files, no changes can be done to the file, including but not limited to copy text, search text, annotate, highlight, etc. Automator Can Not Help Extract Text from Scanned PDF Many mac users may use Automator to extract text from PDF, but still, this can only be workable for native PDF.
You just get blank text file when trying to extracting text from scanned pdf using Automator. Adobe Reader for Mac Can Not Do OCR on Mac Some mac users may have installed Adobe Reader on their mac to view and manipulate PDFs since it is free and easy to view PDFs. However, it Adobe Reader cannot work to do OCR on mac, unless you update to or subscribe its Adobe Acrobat for mac.
As we can see, there is no free ocr solutions on mac at all, we will have to resort to a pdf ocr software. Best OCR for Mac Users To OCR documents on mac, we will need to apply the OCR technology, which helps to recognize texts from image-based files and turn them into digital, editable text that can be understood by your devices. While, an OCR program is powered with such an OCR engine to recognize scanned or image documents. With a powerful OCR program, you can:. Make scanned PDF editable, searchable and copyable;. Recognize text from images files, you can convert image texts to differnt editable formats;.
Convert native and other frequently-used formats; #1 An Easy Yet Efficient Way to Do OCR on Mac For Everyone Wants to Keep Things Simple OCR is rarely accurate or affordable, but we have choice. Here, basing on affordability, simplicity and OCR performance, we recommend. It is an OCR program designed to do virtually all kinds of document conversion with high quality results. Make scanned PDFs and images editable, searchable, copyable;. Recognize 200+ languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Convert native PDFs to 16 formats;. Create PDF from other documents and compress/protect PDF;.
Batch PDF OCR. Extremely easy to use; Steps to OCR PDF and Image Files on Mac As Cisdem's mac ocr tool offers free trial with full features, here we will take Cisdem PDF Converter OCR, the most affordable and efficient way as a demonstration to OCR a PDF on mac.
Launch Cisdem PDF OCR Program for Mac. Download Cisdem PDF Converter OCR and then install it on Mac. Run it to start ocr a pdf on mac. Add PDF or Image Files for OCR on Mac. Go to the interface of 'Converter', import PDF or images into the program by drag and drop PDF files, or click the '+' button. It supports batch ocr pdf on mac, you can add dozens of files at one time.
Tweak the 'OCR PDF' settings Turn the OCR button ON, select language and page range. It can recognize 200+ languages and supports batch or partial conversion. Also, choose output as needed before starting OCR PDF on mac. Start OCR PDF on mac Click 'Convert' to perform OCR on PDF files.
The OCR process will finish within seconds, you can find the converted file in output folder. The PDF OCR is done!
Also, you can watch the tutorial video to do mac ocr now. #2 Alternative OCR Mac Programs For Users Looking for Advanced OCR Features 1) Adobe Acrobat (Price: From $12.99/month$14.99/month) Adobe Acrobat, since its creation, is always considered as the most powerful program to deal with PDFs, and its prominence apparently continues in PDF ocr. Besides, it is cross-platform allowing different users to benefit from this feature. Speaking of its PDF OCR, Adobe Acrobat can automatically perform OCR on scanned files when exporting to an editable formats, but it also offers a set of tools to enhance the OCR performance, for example, capturing the file with mac camera to do ocr, choose pages to perform partial pdf ocr, copying recognized text with formatting, editing the PDF file after ocr directly. Undoubtedly, Adobe’s editing feature is the key persuading users into such a purchase.
As we know, OCR is rarely perfect, even if there appears OCR errors, users can directly edit or rectify within Adobe, that’s quite convenient. Steps to OCR PDF on Mac. Open PDF with Adobe Acrobat. Go to Tools Enhance Scans, select 'Enhance', you can choose to OCR all pages or current page, then all the PDF text is searchable and selectable, also you can right click on the text to choose 'Edit Text' within the program. Finally, save the PDF file or go to Tools Export as Word or other formats. 2) ABBYY FineReader OCR Pro (Price: $ 119.99) ABBYY FineReader OCR Pro is a dedicated OCR software on Mac for converting scans, PDFs and digital photographs into searchable and editable documents. The OCR process is automated, you only need to tell ABBYY FineReader Pro which document to load and to where the OCR version should be saved.
The functionality of scanning papers as digital copy and then importing into ABBYY FineReader is quite pleasing, it allows users to convert paper files to editable PDF or other format easily and effortlessly. In addition, a series of tools are built in to customize or enhance OCR, such as tweaking paper scanning process, editing image, adjusting image quality, adding new task or pages for OCR, etc. Yet, ABBYY FineReader is just a powerful OCR tool, it doesn’t allow editing, and basing on this, its price seems too high. Steps to OCR PDF on Mac.
Launch the program, choose 'My Mac' to upload scanned PDF for OCR;. Choose the file language, the PDF will be automatically recognized once uploaded, also you can utilize the tools to enhance OCR results;. Go to Export, save as searchable PDF or other formats. Also, watch Abbyy Mac OCR tutorial video For sure, there are a lot of new contenders in this field of PDF OCR, but these 2 OCR programs are always the top choice to consider for our mainstream users. It is quite understandable that the high price put off some users, in light of that some can do the job as good as them without costing so high.
Free OCR Mac Solution to OCR PDF on Mac Search Google, we can find there are several websites that can OCR a PDF on mac for free. Such OCR software can be used online and usually convert on page at a time. However, many of them cannot handle images of poor quality. So people have to ensure they have high quality images when using these online PDF OCR tools, otherwise accuracy will be adversely impacted. Here are the two online options for you to OCR a PDF, which give good results than the other online sites in our test. Onlineocr.net onlineocr.net allows you to convert scanned PDF and images (jpg, bmp) into editable Word, Text, Excel, output formats. And the generated documents keep the layout and images of the original file.
Moreover, this free Online OCR service supports 46 recognition languages. To use this tool your files must not exceed 5mb. Steps to OCR PDF on Mac for Free. Click 'Select file' to upload your scanned PDF;. Choose file language;.
Select output as Word or other supported format;. Click 'Convert' to start OCR on PDF Free Online OCR Free online OCR is another free web-based OCR service to OCR PDF. It can extract text from PDF, GIF, BMP, JPEG, TIFF or PNG files. To get started, just add an image file and select an output format from DOC, PDF, TXT or RTF, and click 'convert'.
Steps to OCR PDF on Mac for Free. Click 'Choose File' to upload files;. Choose output as Word, or other formats;. Click 'Convert' to do OCR on PDF. Disadvantages of Using Online OCR:.
Require extremely high on file resolution;. File quality lost;. Potential risk of information leakage;. Process slowly due to poor internet connection or large file size; Mac OCR Open Source to OCR PDF on Mac Though most of us tend to prefer a professional Mac OCR program, there are still some users looking for Mac OCR open source, especially those tech-savvy or coding-savvy users who think mac ocr open source brings better OCR results. Here are 2 popular Mac OCR Open Source: #1 Tesseract OCR.
Platforms: Mac, Windows, Linux. Support languages: 100+.
Where to get: Tesseract is an open source OCR engine started in 1980s, and later sponsored by Google since 2006. Now, it has become one of the most accurate ocr open source and widely applied to optimize Google services. Users can find the source on GitHub, a great platform allowing software builders to communicate and collaborate. #2 CuneiForm OCR. Platforms: Mac, Windows, Linux.
Support languages: 20. Where to get: Cuneiform is an open source text recognition program working on printed files.
It does a prominent job to recognize scanned files and supports batch OCR, but relatively poor on highly maintain table structure. Though the open source is not frequently updated, even there is no any update for, years the Cuneiform team still work on this and users can expect to get something more.
Definitely, there will be more and more mac ocr open source come to us, but currently, a great part of users adhere to professional OCR programs, for following reasons:. Mac OCR open source is not for everyone. Most of our users are not computer professionals, either want to get the OCR work done by doing everything ourselves. Mac OCR open source is, obviously, not the only way we get accurate OCR results.
Professionals, such as Cisdem, Adobe, they are taking accurate OCR job to us, also, they does this for us. Mac OCR open source doesn’t give extended features, you may only allowed to make the files in text, but not to editable and well-formatted Word, Excel, Keynote, etc. Final Words So, which one will you choose to do ocr on your mac and make your scanned files editable for futher use? There may be more choices out there, but the one well balancing funtionality, OCR performance and simplicity, in my opinion, is Cisdem PDF Converter OCR. For users who want to keep their paper work simply but efficient, it is worth a try.
Hot Articles. Image is widely used on Internet because it is highly web-friendly, that's the reason why so many files are stored in image files. But if you want to use the image contents, you need to perform ocr on it. Here we will introduce 3 efficient ways to ocr image on mac. With a growing demand of recognizing text or content from scanned files & image captures, OCR tools get popular. Cisdem is the one stands out from dozens of OCR tool designers, for its high OCR quality and creative features.
Some people use Mac in their work and life, but others use windows. Windows users can’t directly open Keynote file, but PDF files can be spread well between Mac and windows.
So for windows users can open keynote files, we usually need to convert Keynote to PDF.