Looking for an OCR software for mac

By Claude Renaud, 15 November, 2017

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hello,

I’m looking for an OCR software for Mac in which it’s possible to edit the recognised text directly without exporting it first in another app (as Omnipage allows to do on windows for example).
Could someone give me some advice please ?

Regards,

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Comments

By Justin on Friday, November 24, 2017 - 17:40

Hi,
I'm not sure if you can edit the recognized text once its has scanned like you're wanting to do, but I've had good luck with the ABBYY fineReader pro app. It can scan multiple documents and does a great job at recognition.

By JTran2013 on Friday, November 24, 2017 - 17:40

Hi,
DocuScan Plus is available for Mac. You will be able to edit a document etc.

I personally use it on Windows and I definitely love it!

By Claude Renaud on Friday, November 24, 2017 - 17:40

In reply to by JTran2013

Ok I will take a look at it soon ! Does DocuScan have a good recognition accuracy ? How much does it cost and where to find it please ?

By Claude Renaud on Friday, November 24, 2017 - 17:40

In reply to by Justin

No, unfortunately according to my testings it’s not possible from FineReader, à software I also used to work with before. I really loved Omnipage on Windows and was very disappointed when they abandoned it on the Mac platform. Is there an Openbook-like for mac ?

By Voracious P. Brain on Friday, November 24, 2017 - 17:40

If you need real accuracy, as in scanning books for school or work, then the Fine Reader Engine used by KNFBReader and ABBYY can't really be replaced. It became better than the ScanSoft engine found in OmniPage and Jaws some versions back, in my experience. Fine reader's lack of immediate editing is definitely a pain, but one can scan a couple of pages, open the file, and then batch scan the rest.
I'm still hoping for KNFBReader for Mac. The Enterprise licensing makes it a worthy investment, though they're screwing over those of us who were early adopters before the Enterprise license was a thing. Honestly, an IPhone on a stand plus KNFBReader for IOS can be a Mac OCR replacement.
If you're just scanning the mail, then apps like Prizmo can be ok. No real comparison with the Fine Reader Engine, though.
Another option is to create a Bootcamp partition with an unactivated Windows copy and put KNFBReader or whatever on there. Windows will work fine without buying it, particularly from a blind person's perspective. That's a long walk, but depends on how intensively you oCR. When I was in grad school, scanning an entire book every day, I would not want to have been on a Mac.
Incidentally: I have an automator action to let me send files directly to Fine Reader for recognition from Finder and land the results on the desktop. Lots of built-in automator options from ABBYY. It's the equivalent of the KOCRUtil from Kurzweil 1000, which was my go-to for PDF articles until Google Chrome got so good at displaying PDFs on Windows. You can also set up a similar Automator action to extract pdf text without ABBYY, so long as it's a text-based PDF and not just images, although line and paragraph formatting remain better from ABBYY even for text PDFs.

Thank you for your point of view ! I will reconsider FineReader even if I don’t like it ! Do you know if there’s a Kurzweil version for mac ?
And at least, even if I prefer Prizmo’s look, it seems definitely less robust than FineReader I think ...

No K1000 on Mac. Thank goodness. With KNFBReader, it's very hard to make a use case for K1000 anymore. If you have it, though, I'd consider the BootCamp route if you need to do a lot of scanning and if you have 64Gb or so free on your hard drive. It's pretty easy to set up using the Bootcamp assistant in utilities, and you can always blow the partition away if you're done with it.
Just try whatever out for the full evaluation period before purchasing, so you can make your decision without being hasty with the cash. Again, I don't know what your specific uses are.