OCR, but on a Mac!
This app is a wrapper for the OCRmyPDF command line interface, which itself is built on the Tesseract engine for optical character recognition (OCR) of PDFs built from un-processed images. It is designed in particular to make it easy and simple for users not habituated to the command line to OCR documents on a Mac.
Clicking on this link downloads the latest version of the app!
This application requires both OCRMyPDF and Tesseract.
For users who are uncomfortable or unhabituated to the command line, I have bundled a small application called 'Dependency Installer', which will install (in the event these are not already installed): Homebrew, Tesseract, OCRmyPDF, and Tesseract-Lang. The final installation will take up a non-trivial large amount of space (~500mb), so please be aware of this when choosing to use the automated installation!
Homebrew users can install these simply by using the following code:
brew install ocrmypdf; brew install tesseract
Users will have to determine which languages are needed for their work; to install all languages, the code below works:
brew install tesseract-lang
Simply drag a PDF in need of a good OCR and put it on the app! Then, select the language to be used, by typing the Tesseract language codes (eng, fre, deu, etc); a complete list of the language codes is available at this link. The default code is set to 'eng,', so English-only users can simply press 'return'. Then, simply wait as the PDF is outputted.
For the sake of simplicity (I wanted this usage to be as incredibly easy as possible), I have dictated that this app will, first, force OCR on all pages, including those with existing text; this is because skipping such pages would miss the point for use cases involving poorly OCRed texts needing a redo, and frankly, adding additional options would be more coding than I was prepared to do. It will also always output documents conforming to the PDF/A standard (this is good, mostly!).
This is free and open-source software, licensed under the MIT licence. Users may use it as they please. The icon of the project and the app is deisgned by Flaticon User Freepik and licensed under the Flaticon licence.