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Preview's image->text capabilities?

I am not exactly sure this is a bug/problem issue. Actually I think I only need to verify exactly what Preview is capable of (it seems it's quite capable!) Here's the thing:

I have a multi-page PDF file of a book. It's scanned imagery, not OCR. I repeat: It's not OCR.

How then can I go into the search field (CMD-F) and type in some text and Preview finds it in all its occurrences in the scanned book? Because it does!

Any insight will be greatly appreciated, as always!

MBP 17" 2.4GHz, PowerBook G4 17" 1.67GHz, Mac OS X (10.5.6), TiBook 550MHz Gigabit Ethernet, B/W G3, Win2K, WinXP

Posted on May 25, 2009 1:43 AM

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15 replies

May 25, 2009 11:39 PM in response to musicwind95

musicwind95 wrote:
Does anyone know if Mac OS X has any built-in OCR support, or if there are any good OCR programs for Mac? (Not OmniPage...the most recent version is a couple years old as far as I know.)


Acrobat has OCR (not the free version though), and so does VueScan. I don't think Apple makes anything that does OCR.

Also, scanners don't do OCR, scanner software does. If a scanner was driven with software that doesn't do OCR, it won't happen, but if a scanner is driven with software that does, like OmniPage, VueScan or Acrobat, then it is possible to output OCR'd pages.

May 26, 2009 9:08 AM in response to Chris CA

OmniPage X Pro has not been updated in a long time. I doubt that Nuance has any Mac programmers left. It still works all right, but it is a pain to install it, as they have not even updated the installers. Once it is installed, you need to change the permissions on one of the folders in the installation or it will not work.

To answer the original question, I believe that some image PDFs have the text converted by OCR which lives under the image. If you do a search for text, it can find that underlying text and select the image above it. As was noted above, it takes a paid version of Acrobat to make such files. If this has not been done, you cannot search for text.

May 26, 2009 10:57 AM in response to Bruce De Benedictis

OmniPage X Pro has not been updated in a long time. I doubt that Nuance has any Mac programmers left

Not sure how this is relevant...

As was noted above, it takes a paid version of Acrobat to make such files. If this has not been done, you cannot search for text.

Since the doc in question was created with Omnipage 12 and has already been OCR'd, and can be searched ...
User uploaded file

Preview's image->text capabilities?

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