OCR Comparison By Marco Arment

OCR Comparison By Marco Arment

12:38If there was some way to find out what the most used non-Apple app on my iPhone and iPad is, it would almost certainly be Instapaper by Marco Arment. I am either saving or reading articles in there every single day.

Between my Instapaper use and listening to the Build and Analyze podcast, I spend a possibly disturbing amount of time each week either listening to Marco’s voice or interacting with his work.

It was for this reason that I thrilled when he linked to my PDFPen OCR AppleScript post on his blog, Marco.org.

Besides the DocumentSnap link, his post Mac software to add searchable text to scanned PDFs is a great rundown of the different options for performing Optical Character Recognition on the Mac.

As part of my workflow, which isn’t very interesting, I’d like OCR software to recognize the text in scanned documents and embed it under the page images in their PDF files. With the text embedded, I can search the documents with Spotlight and attempt to organize them more easily.

If you are looking for OCR software for your Mac, it is worth taking a look at Marco’s post for his conclusion.

Myself, I am going to take a closer look at PDF OCR X for a future post. DocumentSnap reader Drew has had good results as he reported in this forum thread.

Do you have any OCR software to add? Let us know in the comments.

(Photo by Tom T)

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 5 comments

Justin Gordon - August 20, 2012 Reply

I"m not convinced on issues with Evernote. You can drag pdf documents out of evernote into folders on the Mac. The key fro my family is to keep it simple. I can leave the scanner attached to a separate PC, run the paper through the scansnap, and it's then searchable on any of 10 other devices in my family. That being said, I'd love to know if there's something I'm missing.

    Brooks Duncan - August 20, 2012 Reply

    Yeah, Evernote has made great strides as far as getting your data out in the past while.

DocumentSnap Time Machine | Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog - August 19, 2012 Reply

[…] OCR Comparison By Marco Arment Great list of Mac OCR software packages by the creator of one of my favorite services, Instapaper. […]

Niv - August 30, 2011 Reply

I think so, because somewhere down the line you will want to get your data OUT of Evernote, and from what I have read, that is not easy and/or possible.

In my opinion, it is better to keep your files as your files, as opposed to putting them in an all-in-one bucket.

fotofah - August 19, 2011 Reply

Is this better than having Evernote scan my .pdfs with my Premium account (with less work on my part)?

Leave a Reply: