If you need to select, copy or search through the text inside a scanned PDF file, you need to run the file through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that is able to recognize text on the PDF and make it searchable. A good OCR software for Mac should be able to quickly convert a PDF to text and support multiple languages, such that you can OCR a wide variety of PDFs. With PDF Expert, you can convert your PDF files to OCRed text on Mac by following this simple guide.
How to OCR scanned PDFs on Mac
- Download PDF Expert for free and launch the app.
- Drag & Drop your PDF file into the app to open it.
- Click on the Scan & OCR option at the top of the app window.
- Click on the Recognize Text option.
- When you see There is no selectable text on this page message, click on Recognize. Alternatively, choose the correct language in the sidebar and click on Recognize.
- Choose the Language of your scanned PDF document, then select which Pages you want to recognize text on and click on Apply.
- PDF Expert will instantly run its OCR scan technology on the file and recognize all the text it can find.
- For any words that can’t be recognized, PDF Expert makes a best effort guess and allows you to manually correct any wrong guesses, as shown below.
Now, you can select and copy the text on this PDF file as well as highlight text and search for words or phrases.
PDF Expert is the go-to PDF app for Mac. Boasting an effortless design, it makes your PDF life easy by empowering you with the right set of tools to help you with any PDF task. Read and annotate books, take notes, edit PDFs, sign documents, and more.