If 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)
