You probably won’t be performing text extraction against 1920s magazine articles-maybe so, if you’re like me!-but the slightly degraded nature of the source text and quality of the scan puts the services and software to a more substantial test than pristine rendered typography.

You can see the figures below with each app or service noted. For a long time, Adobe Acrobat has been the best PDF editor for Mac but nowadays it can do so much more than manage PDF documents. ABBYY® FineReader PDF is a PDF tool for working more efficiently with digital documents.

With PDFpenPro, you can add text and signatures, make corrections, OCR scanned docs and more, just like PDFpen. To covert text in PDFpen, choose Edit > OCR Page or hold down Option and choose Edit > OCR Document. For a side-by-side comparison that demonstrated my results starkly, I copied out the results of recognition against the same legibly typeset magazine copy from a 1920s Popular Mechanics article (about comic-strip production). Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is aimed at offices that want to go completely digital to everything from scanning documents to e-signatures. Export to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint. PDFpen is an excellent app for working with PDFs. In researching this article, I tested a range of images and documents that proved fairly consistent across each service or app.

You may already have a free account or paid subscription to one of the services below or own the software. These types also include PDFs with scanned images that have no text layer already inserted or extracted. Best for individuals and small-scale requirements (Free). If you are trying to access text in images you have, whether documents, photos, or forms, you have many options available.

Best ocr for mac