By Joseph Westhouse, 12 April, 2013
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Hi, all!
I'm beginning to wonder if this exists - but I figure it doesn't hurt to ask. I'm looking for something that can perform OCR on pre-scanned .pdf files. Adobe Acrobat can do this, I believe, and allegedly Google Docs does as well (but we all know how consistent Google's accessibility is...) I'm hoping there's an iOS app that can do the trick as well.
To be clear: I'm not looking for an app that will scann a document or take a picture and perform OCR. I'm looking for something that I could import a .pdf into and have the app perform OCR on the scanned document in the .pdf file. So...anybody ever used an app that would do the trick?
Thanks!
~ JWB
Comments
Version 2 of the Prizmo app will OCR from PDF files
At the time of your initial posted question in April 2013, the only way to OCR PDF files with iOS apps was to take screen captures of the images and run an OCR of the individual images from the camera roll. The alternative was to upload the PDFs to a conversion server, either via apps that could run the OCR fairly fast at a charge per page or where you'd have to wait for the results to come back. However, with the release of the version 2 upgrade to the Prizmo app on May 14, 2013, you can run OCRs directly from PDFs, have support for multipage documents, and also have Dropbox integration. Alternatively, if you received the multi-page PDF document as an attachment in mail, you can double tap on the attachment, and then "open in" Prizmo. The work flow has been considerably simplified with a "Recognize" button, and you can also export as text, PDF, or searchable PDF to other apps, including Dropbox.
Hooray!