What OCR (optical Character recognition) software is compatible with iMac?

mac ocr software

I have used Readiris Pro from Image Recognition Integrated Systems SA ("IRIS") for my occasional OCR needs over the past decade. In the recent past, I have run version 14 on various Macs running 10.7.x, 10.8.x, and 10.9.2. I don't have an iMac to test it on, but it should run fine.

I couldn't say whether it will support your scanner directly, but it claims to support any scanner that the natove Image Capture application supports and (if you install a TWAIN driver supplied by the printer manufacturer) any TWAIN 1.7-compliant scanner.

I don't see a CX8600 on Epson's support site. There are Image Capture drivers for Epson Stylus CX8400 or CX6600. (Among the many Epson all-in-ones listed, those numbers seemed closest.)

Also, even if Readiris doesn't support it directly, you can always use the two-step process: scan to an image file using whatever you use to scan now, then OCR the resulting graphic file with Readiris.

They also have a 30-day money back guarantee if you buy from them directly.

ABBYY Finereader OCR software was included with my Epson Artisan 837 all-in-one. This included version works pretty darn well. I would recommend looking into the commercial version.

My new Brother multifunction came with Presto PageManager. I can't recommend that it in the least. Its OCR is terribly inaccurate to the point of being unusable in my tests. Even normal sentences came out mashed together.

I wanted to try IRIS, but it has no test version, just videos, that I could find, and emails to them just led to a Windows demo that is irrelevant. They ignored my email asking about a Mac demo, so I could not even try it out. That pretty much knocks it out of the running for me as this software is too expensive to just buy based on their promotional videos alone.

Then there's Vuescan, and it's not too bad for OCR and supports about every device you could possibly conceive of using, and that's a plus. It was fairly accurate, but not as accurate as Finereader Pro. The interface is a bit complex to my taste.

I've been testing out ABBYY Finereader Pro, and they do have a demo, and so far it seems to be the most accurate of what I've been able to test. It gets pretty close to everything on English and Spanish, and supports most common languages (check the list on their website). It even properly recognized syllables of phonetic Tibetan (using Roman alphabet, but it will not detect Tibetan). The UI is pretty good, but not perfect and there's no way to train for odd words you might need. I haven't tried it for Chinese or Japanese, but for my purposes, unless I find something more economical, I'll buy this one for its accuracy.

I really suggest you download demos and try them for yourself as none of these are particularly cheap

I have found ABBYY Finereader OCR software (commercial) to work very well with MBP, including earlier OSX thru Mavericks.