All documents must have a resolution of at least 72dpi (Dots Per Inch) in order to scan in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC which is a fairly low requirement.

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.

Click on the Edit PDF tool in the right-hand pane.

If you just want to make the text editable or searchable in a PDF document, it’s very straightforward. Rather it’s a PDF conversion software that has an in-built OCR engine that can take PDFs or other formats and turn them into something that can be searched by keywords or edited. 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/M2 chip Macs, Adobe Acrobat runs natively on Apple Silicon M1 & M2 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 and M2 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 2023. With this in mind, here is our list of the best OCR scanning software for Mac of 2023 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. The best OCR tools work well with all texts but some will struggle with certain types of documents.The top OCR tools can export to popular formats such as Microsoft Word, and ePub/eBook formats while not losing the original formatting of the PDF or document. However, most people want their document formatting preserving the same as the original document and budget OCR apps simply can’t do this. 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. In our research, one thing that clearly stood out is that not all OCR scanning programs on Mac perform the same.It’s also the best software to sign documents on a Mac if you need to scan and sign documents including legally binding contracts.īefore diving in to the reviews, there’s a few things to be aware of to avoid disappointment when choosing which is the best scanning software for Mac to use.

Since Adobe invented the PDF format, Acrobat Pro DC is also by far the best PDF editing software you’ll find on Mac allowing you to convert any paper document into PDFs which makes them much easier to store, search and share.

We found that by far the best OCR software for Mac is Adobe Acrobat Pro DC which is incredibly fast and accurate at scanning documents and preserving the formatting. With the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19), being able to scan, sign and digitize documents is more important than ever before and OCR software also enables you to manage documents more efficiently if you’re setting-up a remote office. They also make it possible to scan documents on a Mac without a document scanner. Optical Character Recognition software (often referred to simply as scanning software) can scan, extract text and make documents searchable and editable including invoices, images, handwriting, magazines, textbooks and more. If you need to scan and digitize documents accurately, we’ve taken a look at the very best OCR scanning software for Mac in 2023 to scan paperwork into searchable PDFs and more.

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