PDFPEN OCR cheaper alternative?

Edcontente · June 30, 2018, 5:18pm

Hi guys, I’m trying to find a alternative for OCRing PDFs that won’t break the bank. Any thoughts?

ecophoscys · June 30, 2018, 5:41pm

I use PDFscanner from the Mac app store and it seems to work fine for me. I think it was $15? https://www.pdfscannerapp.com/

It even has a Automator add-on that you can use it with Hazel to automatically OCR a PDF that hasn’t been OCRed and then take action on that.

dfay · June 30, 2018, 5:59pm

OCRKit - from ExactScan

Britishxninja · June 30, 2018, 6:34pm

If you have a SetApp subscription, Prizmo has OCR capabilities.

gxwilso · June 30, 2018, 6:36pm

PDFscanner works well for me.

Edcontente · June 30, 2018, 7:16pm

Thanks, guys. I’ll give pdfscanner a try.

I don’t have a setApp subscription… But thanks anyways.

jl_siewert · June 30, 2018, 7:21pm

I use OCRmyPDF. It is an open source command line tool based on Tesseract.

I have set up Hazel to automatically run the script on any pdf in my Inbox that does not contain an e and haven’t had any issues with it.
I don’t have a comparison on accuracy with PDFPen Pro or Prizmo though.

vco1 · June 30, 2018, 7:57pm

PDFSandwich. Also uses Tesseract for OCR. Does some pre-processing too. Commandline tool that van be installed via Homebrew. Completely free.

geekifier · February 24, 2019, 6:11pm

I second this recommendation. I found that OCRmyPDF produces smaller files and better OCR than some of the expensive commercial apps I have tried. It’s also faster, and does a great job of deskewing scans automatically.

ldebritto · June 16, 2019, 11:11am

Hey JL,

Thanks for the recommendation I’ll definitely try it. Would you mind sharing the exact command you use on your hazel rule?

funkydan2 · June 17, 2019, 4:26am

I’ve been using PDFIfy and it does a fair enough job of OCR (only used on documents with a few pages.