If you regularly work with PDFs and need a good solution, PDFpen or PDFpenPro are great options with a fixed $75 or $125 price to own the software. If you just need to OCR a couple of PDFs, using a free trial of PDFpen or Adobe’s Acrobat Pro will work. Many of the options are from unknown developers, and there are inherently risks associated with downloading and using free software outside of the Mac App Store. There are a lot of free options that pop up in a Google search for “OCR PDF on Mac” but be careful of what software you choose.

Click the Edit PDF tool in right hand sidebar and Acrobat will automatically apply OCR to your document (it will also be editable).

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.

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