Free OCR software doesn’t preserve the formatting of documents.Try to use the biggest font size possible too – the bigger the font, the easier it is for OCR engines to recognize, especially when it comes to free utilities. Magazine quality resolution of 300dpi is required for best results. To improve your chances of good results, you need to make sure the images or PDFs you are scanning are clear and good quality to start with.

This means you’ll have to do a lot of manual readjustment or retyping of text after scanning.

The main problem with free OCR apps is that they are far more inaccurate than paid software, especially when it comes to low resolution or low quality documents.

To avoid disappointment, there’s a few things to be aware of before using any free OCR software: The apps and tools featured here do a very basic job of converting PDFs, images and other files into text that can be searched, edited or copy-pasted. If you don’t want to spend hours correcting badly scanned text or you’re serious about creating a paperless office on your Mac you definitely get what you pay for when it comes to OCR scanning. Optical Character Recognition is a highly specialized technology and the apps featured here do a a very crude job and certainly won’t be accurate or preserve the formatting of documents. With something as complex as OCR scanning, you really get what you pay for if you want good results. It’s a relatively small investment for something you’ll probably use a lot and will save you so much lost time and energy correcting the errors that free OCR tools make. Our top recommendation is the amazing Acrobat Pro DC by Adobe which actually invented the PDF format and is by far the best solution when it comes to OCR scanning and then editing PDFs. If you want something that’s going to scan documents quickly, accurately and preserve the formatting you need one of these best OCR tools on your Mac. Let’s be clear from the start, you’re not going to get great results with free OCR software.

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