Adobe Acrobat does this sort of export very well, but it’s expensive. I pay something like $12/yr for the Adobe service, accessible in Adobe reader on the iPad that exports an OCR pdf scan to a Word doc. I think PDF Expert has the same capabilities but you need to pay for the yearly subscription and that’s 4x the cost of the Adobe service.
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This is almost perfect. For my OCR needs, I want the resulting file NOT to have formatting. So, that is great. The one problem is this seems to save each page of the extracted text as a separate file. Anyway to make it one file?
Also, is there anyway to use this to just OCR a pdf and keep the OCR layer in the PDF? This is one of those problem areas, too. I was under the impression that you could only OCR a PDF if you did the scan on the iPad using something like Scanner Pro. Many of my PDFs come to me “un-OCR’d” but I need to make them searchable. We have tools on our Windows machines that do this, but I’d like to just do it locally on my iPad in many cases.
If you are a Google Drive user you can upload a non-OCR file and it will be OCR’d automatically.
Or you can upload a PDF and immediately “Open with Google Docs” in Safari and it will create an editable document, which you can download as Microsoft Word.
Convert PDF and photo files to text - Computer - Google Drive Help
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Great tip! That worked just as described in Safari on the iPad!
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Thanks for a very insightful and balanced comment. Thanks also for the informative responses by many. I am not a lawyer (professional services ie consulting) but my use cases and non use cases are pretty identical. The only frustrations I experience are; dealing with ancient non mobile web sites, poorly designed mobile sites, and work related software ie sales force, concur etc, which have limited functionality or glitchy user experiences. Non of this is iPad driven, more poor software by 3rd party app developers. The multi-functionality of the Ipad is brilliant. My wishes are: back up to external drive (Time Machine type), a better version of MS Outlook (contacts, tasks, file expansion/closing are awful) (yes Microsoft I’m talking about you), better drag and drop for files, and between other software ie Onedrive, Googledrive etc (sadly needed for work). Anyway, thanks again for a great post. Now if I could only decide between my 11” and 12.9” for work, I’d be a happy man!
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ATM i’m doing my EE engineering degree at uni, and last academic year I noticed the usage of iPad as a note-taking device has become very trendy among students. It’s much easier to have all your PDFs, course books and hand-written notes, usually on either Notability or Goodnotes, all in one light and slim device, than trying to handle and organise all these papers and constantly printing stuff or scanning them.
Personally, i’ve applied the Paperlike/Bellemond film over my screen to mimic the feeling and friction of writing on paper, it’s good but not perfect. I would love to see Apple try doing something similar and push the technology into much refined experience. This will also help saves the trees that are wasted on papers every year.
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I have a 12.9 iPad Pro with an M2. It all happened by accident when I connected the Thunderbolt connector from my Samsung monitor to see if it would charge the iPad and booom! it was using the external display, with the attached Logitech keyboard and mouse.
It’s not macOS, but it gets a similar feel for simple focused activities, like if you were using a very powerful Chromebook. I found I could work with the iPad and several Safari tabs using Google Docs. Having the big screen along with a physical keyboard & mouse made more difference than I was expecting.
For me it heralded the future of Apple mobility… my next Apple computer will not be a laptop (probably a Mac Mini or Studio) as my mobility needs would be covered by the iPad Pro (my mobility needs being having a Teams meeting, or finishing a Powerpoint deck for work)
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Agreed. Having a big screen really helps. I’ve long thought that the unspoken (vague, lurking in the background) frustration with the iPad as a computer, has been the simple fact that an 11" inch screen is simply too small. I use the 13" which is sufficient but I would not want to go smaller. I can’t imagine using the 11" and feeling the screen was big enough (though some seem fine with it). But connect an external monitor, and you’ve got a lot more space and are in a mode more akin to the familiar keyboard/trackpad/mouse interaction. I suspect it will be even better with iPadOS 17 and the change to more free form windowing.
I love the 11” but I find it’s portability, and size make it the ideal “take everywhere and achieve little device”. Why? Simply too comfortable to use and it’s easy to slip into mindless doom scrolling, reading a dozen newspapers, YouTube surfing, when you’re actually supposed to be working. The 12.9 is great as an entertainment device; movies and music etc. However, the larger size seems to “implore” one to do something more productive and creative, which it does very capably (non coder, non nuclear pyschicist here). Yes its not a laptop but for those of use burdened with non Mac work laptops, which allow you to prepare 2 cappuccinos and bake a cake during the time they take to boot up, makes an IPad brilliant. Zero friction to get started and 90% of normal office work acheivable. If my company let me remote log into our servers by VPN, which is what we do with the Dell laptops, I could easily work 100% on the iPad. Heck even Salesforce and SAP seem to work well.
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Just a follow-up @Denny - This may read over the top, but I use this shortcut several times a day (nearly every day) and it has saved me tons of time fiddling around. One of my heretofore most frequently-encountered trouble spots, resolved with an easy Shortcut.
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Me too, and it has replaced my MBA for 90% of the things I do. I value portability over screen size and fortunately Apple has given us both the tool that we need.
Too bad your company won’t let you log into their servers. My first workflow 30 years ago used a “server” (actually an old 386) to eliminate 2 hours of data entry each day for some of my users. I’ve always preferred to use servers, and now cloud, to do the heavy lifting whenever possible.
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That’s fantastic! I’m finding it pretty useful too! 
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Schlock!! 
What a perfect word. Us Aussies would probably call it “crap” but schlock is so richer! Thanks for the vocab enhancement. 
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