PDF OCR X Community Edition 4+

On my mid-2011 iMac running Sierra, this FREE OCR software did really well.

After transcribing about a hundred pages of a presentation deck, I found the following issues (sorted by rarity - where rare was listed last)
1) Punctuation: periods and commas iinterchanged.
2) The letter i and j interchanged (someone else reported this I believe .. user mpe01) Also ‘h’ for ’n' and ‘o' for ‘c' have been an issue.
3) Formatting like bulleted lists would be intermittently accurate
4) Chopped text: in the 100 pages I lost a string of 3 characters

For a free OCR it transcribed these pages really well. I only transcribed use of the helvetica font. A serif font might yield better results.

One note for customer: font size of original has a huge impact on the outcome! If you can, increase the font size for better results.

One developer note I would like to have seen is that the execute button [Convert] was ‘on’ by default. I would rather just drag-n-drop, have focus in the app, and hit return rather than click the button.

I’m very, very impressed with this app. It recognizes all of my scanned text, and I haven’t seen it make any mistakes when interpreting my scans. For the record, the material I’m scanning has all been in Times New Roman font, so I haven’t yet attempted anything else. But for a free application, this is exactly what I was looking for and more.

Because the app is free, please know that you can read only one PDF page at a time. This means the application will not read multi-paged documents unless you upgrade to the paid version. The developers do mention that upfront. For my purposes, though, this free app has worked just fine. The menus are simple and very easy to understand, and again, the OCR itself has been nearly flawless.

I was searching for a decent app, and for me, this one is it. I’ll likely upgrade to the paid version if I ever need to scan multi-paged PDFs quickly, as opposed to trying something from a different developer. I’m very impressed and happy I found this.

Very pleased. I compared to another tool OCR I have, and "PDF OCR X ce" did WAY better on the screen shot text sample than my other utility. It was as reasonable a result as the pro product I used years ago. They thoughfully include an option to comment on results and include the image you fed it, so you can help them improve the product. I hope someday they add a little AI to guess corrections based on spelling, grammar and context. Perhaps in the paid version?

Remember, garbage in, garbage out. The cleaner, higher res scan you provide, the better chance of accurancy.
PDFs come in many flavors, so if this product can’t read yours, try scanning a print out, or print-to-PDF to change the PDF format.