Once it’s done, you can tap the screen to toggle between the scanned text and the OCR’d text. You can have the entire document scanned, or just a select page. Even high-end computers get OCR wrong many times, so don’t expect the iPhone or iPad to be perfect. It takes a lot of crunch power for a computer processor to try to recognize text, and the results are rarely 100%. An attorney just recently e-mailed me a great e-discovery opinion from a county court in Michigan, but it wasn’t searchable and I wanted to highlight some of the great quotes.įrom the Mail app, I opened the PDF in PDFpen Scan+ and tapped OCR. WE INTERRUPT THIS REIVIEW FOR AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Just as I was going to press with this review, Scanbot released a major update (version 6) that now may offer this option – I will review Scanbot soon.Īnd that’s why I keep PDFpen Scan+ on my iPhone & iPad. There is no option for Scanner Pro, and Scanbot even states on their support website that “Applying OCR to existing scans is not yet possible, but we’re working on it.” But text highlighting won’t work on a NON-searchable PDF.Īgain, if I’m starting from scratch with a paper document, this isn’t a problem because when I’m done with Scanner Pro or Scanbot, I just use the “Open In” button to copy the OCR’d PDF over to GoodReader.īut what happens if someone e-mails me a PDF and didn’t OCR it first? I SHOULD just be able to use the “Open In” function to send the non-searchable PDF to Scanner Pro or Scanbot so I can OCR it there, but I don’t have that option! Why is this important? Because the next step in my workflow is that I want to pull the PDF into GoodReader or PDF Expert so that I can annotate the file with text highlights, underline, etc. OCR stands for “ Optical Character Recognition” and it is how a computer (or iPad) converts a picture of a document into a fully searchable PDF file. If I don’t do this, I just have a pretty picture of a document which I can read with human eyeballs, but it’s just a picture to the iPad. That is, the app will do its best job at optically recognizing the characters of text so that the resulting PDF is searchable. I snap the picture (or “scan”) the document and now both apps will automatically OCR the document. So let me explain … If someone hands me a piece of paper, and I want to “scan it” with my iPhone or iPad, I go straight to Scanner Pro or Scanbot (usually Scanbot). Now, there are several apps for “scanning” documents with the iPhone & iPad – in fact, I recently reviewed Scanner Pro from Readdle and if you are scanning a paper document from scratch, then I absolutely recommend using Scanner Pro or the excellent Scanbot app (review coming soon).īut I still keep PDFpen Scan+ on my iPhone and iPad for one specific reason – to OCR non-searchable PDFs that I already have, or that were e-mailed to me. I am a big fan of Smile Software and their PDFpen software for Mac and apps for iOS (as well as their time-saving TextExpander apps, and I wanted to talk about their “scanning” app called PDFpen Scan+. Today’s app is PDFpen Scan+ from Smile Software, a universal app for both the iPhone and iPad at $6.99, and requires iOS 8.0 and higher.
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