I've found Elucidate very useful. It's a front-end for the Tesseract engine.It can handle most pdfs, but fails with some poorly-scanned pdfs. It outputs a new pdf file, with a new text layer, so it's relatvely easy to check the text against the pdf. Unfortunately, it processes the output through Quartz, so it isn't entirely compatible with some other pdf tools.

As part of my academic work, I scan and collect tons of PDFs of various articles and books. If these PDFs are searchable in MacOS Preview, it facilitates my research process, allowing me to query, cite, and quote documents quickly. Unfortunately, many of the documents that I collect, especially those from JSTOR or ones that I scan myself, lack automatic text searchability in Preview. I run into this problem about ten times a day.ELUCIDATE SOLVED MY PROBLEM. I now use Elucidate to convert these unsearchable PDFs into searchable ones. The operation is as simple as drag and drop. The advanced features in preferences are killer too! I am especially fond of the addition of various language dictionaries (I use German and English at the same time). The file overwrite-after-convert option is great as well.I would also like to extend my gratitude to the developer, who has been so responsive to all of my questions about the application’s functionality. I look forward to working with this application for years to come, as it is now an integral part of my daily workflow. I would pay ten times the asking price for this app. 10/10 would purchase again!

I have been looking for a cheap solution for OCR for a while, particularly one that did not include uploading to a website. I’ve beenreally pleased with this solution and hope that it continues to improve.Feature Request: It would be great to see separate status bars for each PDF that I am OCR’ing. Currently, when I drop additional documents into the app, at least when one is already OCR’ing, I can only see the one status bar. It seems to have a little bit of trouble with OCR’ing multiple documents at the same time, but for the price, I can’t justify knocking off a star.

I've used Elucidate for a few years now. It's been great when I want to copy something out of a PDF that wasn't generated with embedded text. App is tiny but powerful. Super simple to use - just drag and drop. In my configuration I have it set to just overwrite the original file with all the OCR text now in place and have it searchable. Had a glitch when I upgraded to Catalina and the developer responded immediately. This is an app that “just works.” Can’t endorse this app and developer highly enough.