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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