Import the file into Acrobat either from your Mac or flatbed document scanner.If you want to perform an OCR scan of an image, scanned document or other file, the process is as follows: Choose File > Save As to save your new edited document.
You’ll see that any new text you add matches the look of the original font. Click on the element you want to edit.
Acrobat automatically performs an optical character recognition scan (OCR) to your document and converts it to a fully editable copy of your PDF almost instantly.
It’s important to be aware however that Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is not primarily a dedicated OCR software. While most OCR apps require Rosetta to run on M1 Macs, Adobe Acrobat runs natively on Apple Silicon M1 Macs. Nowadays there are many other competitors on the market but when it comes to doing pretty much anything with a PDF, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is still incredibly powerful.Īdobe Acrobat Pro DC has an excellent Mac desktop app although you can also use it online via Adobe Document Cloud.Įven better, Adobe Acrobat is the only OCR software that is compatible with the latest M1 Macs. Special Limited Offer: Students & Teachers get 60% off the entire Adobe Document Cloud suite.That’s because Adobe invented the PDF file format. This is no surprise because at one time, Adobe Acrobat Pro was the only software for turning PDFs into something editable or searchable on Mac.
Adobe Acrobat Pro DCĪdobe Acrobat Pro DC is the original OCR software for scanning documents and our choice for the best OCR software for Mac in 2022. With this in mind, here is our list of the best OCR scanning software for Mac of 2022 in order of ranking. These include handwriting, documents that have been copied multiple times, faxes, tightly spaced text, text in tables, underlined text, small fonts and documents with folds or wrinkles.
Cheap or free OCR apps will only dump a text file onto your Mac (which of course is fine if that’s all you want). The best OCR apps maintain the formatting of your original document after OCR scanning.There are free OCR tools out there but they’re no good if you want decent results.
This is essential if you want to avoid having to do a lot of tedious manual correction of text in PDFs and other documents. OCR is a highly specialized technology and we found that in most cases, you get what you pay for when it comes to software that scans text accurately and quickly. The accuracy and speed varies considerably and there are definitely some that do a better job than others.
If you need to scan and digitize documents accurately, we’ve taken a look at the very best OCR scanning software for Mac in 2022 to scan paperwork into searchable PDFs and more.