Open the PDF with Acrobat that you’d like to apply OCR to.

Download Adobe Acrobat Pro if you don’t already have it (free trial available).

If you don’t see the automatic dialog box asking about OCR, click File → OCR Files… Adobe Acrobat Pro PDFpen supports OCR for 19 languages, use the checkboxes to choose the ones you’d like as shown below.

PDFpen will automatically ask if you want to use OCR on a scanned document.

After installing the app on your Mac, open the PDF document you’d like to apply OCR to.

Download PDFpen or PDFpenPro if you don’t already have it (free trial available).

How to apply OCR to scanned PDFs on Mac PDFpen Let’s take a look at two trusted software options below. While the Preview app on macOS can handle basic editing of PDFs and other documents, it doesn’t have OCR software built-in. If you have a PDF that isn’t searchable it was likely sourced from an image, like a scan. Read on for some options to apply OCR to PDFs on Mac. Do you have a PDF document, but the text isn’t searchable? You can change that with optical character recognition (OCR) software.

Ocr for mac os x