Scanned PDFs and OCR

PDF Pals reads scanned PDFs with OCR built into macOS, on your Mac.

In PDF Pals v2

OCR runs automatically while indexing, on pages with little or garbled text or a large image. The language is detected per page; there is nothing to choose.

Settings

In Settings ▸ Documents, under Reading documents:

• OCR: Accurate (default, slower) or Fast. Applies the next time documents are indexed.
• Use OCR on PDF forms: also OCR pages with form fields.

When text is unreadable

If PDF Pals shows Most of “(document)” has unreadable text, click Re-index with OCR…. You can also right-click the PDF in Documents and choose Re-index with OCR…. It takes about a second per page.

If the document still shows Couldn't index, see troubleshooting.