Does anybody know of a multifunction printer that also has OCR features? Obviously needs to be Mac compatible. Various multifunction printers are easy to find, none seem to have OCR.
I know that higher end machines for bigger companies (several 1000 $$) can do this. They can produce searchable PDFs. But is there anything available for a few hundreds?
My impression is that even entry-level multi-function devices usually include OCR-capable scanning software for Mac/Windows/Phones these days.
Are you asking about multi-function devices that can scan documents for OCR without using a Mac or other client? For example, are you looking for something that can store OCR’d documents in the cloud or to a USB stick entirely by clicking buttons or navigating menus on the scanner?
For clarification, OCR is not the same as scanning. AFAIK multifunction devices can scan and can produce PDFs, but these PDF are not searchable. To be able to search in such PDFs they need to be OCR’ed. If the device can do this in one go it would help us a lot.
Canon has a series of multifunction laser printers that specifically mention the OCR function. They seem to use a helper app on the Mac which makes sense, the manual doesn’t say anything really. These Canon printers are a bit on the expensive side. Are there any others?
In my experience, scanners (and the scanner portions of multifunction devices) simply send image files to the computer and the actual OCR is done by software on the computer–not by the device. There’s plenty of software that performs the OCR on existing image-based PDFs, including PDF apps like PDFPenPro and organizer apps like DevonThink Pro. Many devices come with bundled software that also does this.
But–aside from the bundled software–it’s usually an application on the computer rather than being a feature of the device itself.
Dave
I think you’ll find a lot of entry-level multi-function devices that can produce searchable PDFs out-of-the-box, though the pre-sales documentation can be unclear.
As an exercise, I went to the first page of the Printers & Scanners section at Staples.com and clicked on the cheapest multifunction device I saw. The specs page for the $79.99 Brother MFC-J1010DW lists OCR as a supported feature. You’d need to check exactly how that is implemented to be sure that it supports what you want it to do, but IIRC, the bundled Brother iPrint & Scan software can create searchable PDFs. Even if it doesn’t, the scanner is supported by several third party software tools that can handle those duties, such as the $50 VueScan basic.
Agreed, though I’ve seen devices with a basic, menu-driven OCR capability built-in. Others can leverage cloud resources to do the OCR. There’s a lot of variety out there, sometimes even on relatively inexpensive devices. That said, I prefer to stick with the basics on my own devices.
Thanks @josehill for looking something up for me.
The J1010DW however does not have OCR as a listed feature.
Yes @dave6 I think you’re right it will be bundled software that runs on the Mac. The question remains, which device has such bundled OCR SW. I think this will be cheaper than buying separate OCR software.
I should also have mentioned that I’m rather after a laser, not an inkjet.
Obviously any OCR software bundled with the scanner will be the cheapest ($0) or paid for as part of the purchase price.
But the important question is what is the quality of the OCR software. I suggest that you can do better than the likely open source (and multi-platform) OCR included with the scanner.
macOS already has excellent OCR - just needs the right software to access it. I use OwlOCR - free with a $10 pro version. If it were me, I would attempt to evaluate various low cost alternatives.
But do ask yourself what you want as an endpoint from the OCR process. For example, you may want a PDF with Spotlight searchable text, or embedded text, or separate text file.
Also, do look at VueScan as it may well be a better scanning (as well as OCR) solution than that provided with the scanner. It will also continue to work long after the scanner vendor’s software passes into the “not supported by current macOS” state.
I use DevonThink to OCR scans from my Oki MC363. They have sales usually around Thanksgiving.
Why doesn’t Preview work? I just tested this in Ventura, which has an OCR box to check. I scanned something in with the box checked and it did not convert.
Diane
Really interesting new comments. Thanks.
I know VueScan, but didn’t know about its OCR capabilities which is based on OpenSource Tesseract (Tesseract (software) - Wikipedia)
I knew that macOS is able to recognise text in certain circumstances, I was not aware that this can accessed similar to a full featured OCR software.
DevonThink os not so much my thing, but thanks @dianed143 for the suggestion.
Where is the OCR function in Preview, how would I use it? I’m on Sonoma.
Maybe I need to change my plan to getting a decent multifunction laser printer and do OCR with a separate software.
OCR is listed under “Scan-to” features on the unit’s support page on the Brother website. I’m sorry I didn’t say that explicitly. I was under some time pressure while writing.
In any case, my intention wasn’t to recommend that particular device. It was only to point out that OCR is not a rare feature on inexpensive multi-function devices and that you might need to dig around for more details. Manufacturers can be remarkably superficial in their consumer sales literature.
In the past, I’ve purchased low end (<$250) multi-function devices that included third party OCR software, like Presto, PaperPort, etc. or that used the OEM’s own software. It does seem to be a trend for more recent devices to supply their own branded software, like Brother’s iPrint & Scan.
In Preview, if you do File/Import from (you should see your printer), you will get a box with some options. In Ventura with my Oki, OCR was one of them but it did not OCR the sheet I scanned in for some reason.
I also downloaded an app called Cisdem PDF Converter OCR years ago, before I got DevonThink and it works well too. I’ve recently used it to convert scans to Excel and the results were much better than I expected! I don’t believe it’s an expensive program.
Diane
Really? I’ve found the OCR situation on macOS, for just getting text out of a PDF while preserving semantic structure, to be pretty terrible. Ever since FineReader went subscription-only, the only option I found, apart from the usable-but-very-average FLOSS tool/engine Tesseract, has been Prizmo from Creaceed, which is good enough to be automated for most things I’ve thrown at it and is reasonably priced for a one-time purchase on macOS (sub on iOS for cloud OCR), but it doesn’t support as many output document formats and the resulting output files do not preserve as much of the formatting as FineReader did, so although the text recognition itself is really very good, you may still need to touch them up from time to time. The macOS built-in OCR is fine for previewing, but I wouldn’t try to reflow/reformat a PDF with it. ABBYY really was great and I’ve not found anything to truly replace it at a price I’m willing to pay.
Does VueScan do OCR on already-scanned PDF files? And do you know what engine it uses?
Which is why I commented that it is important to know what the end point of the OCR is to be. If it is, say, a Word document with text laid out just like the scanned document, then this requires something decent and probably expensive - you know more than me about this.
If the end point is to extract text or to create a searchable PDF usable with Spotlight content search then I have found the in-built OCR (plus a low cost app) works well. This is my target for OCR.
VueScan uses Tesseract 5. Its target is a searchable PDF. See:
https://www.hamrick.com/ocr.html
https://www.hamrick.com/support/how-to-guides/how-to-create-a-searchable-pdf.html
OCR is built into Image Capture now as well, and it’s free.
As long as we’re tossing out OCR software options for the OP to check out, OCRKit from ExactCODE has been part of my post-scanning workflow for many, many years. There are probably cheaper options out there, but I’ve found it to be quick and flawless. ($50 perpetual license, 14-day free trial).
I didn’t want to disprove what you said or catch you out, I just didn’t see OCR listed on the STAPLES page. But you’re right, it IS mentioned on the manufacturer’s website.
Thanks, at $39/year not expensive indeed, I’ll get a trial.
Possibly an even better deal, thanks for this.
I now found out that many Brother multifunction lasers also include some scanning to OCR function. I haven’t yet dug up what library they use for this.
Hamrick’s VueScan has a checkbox to ensure that all PDFs are text-searchable and indexed by Mac Spotlight.
Should you ever find a PDF with non-searchable text, Adobe Acrobat will fix it for you. Works a treat.
BTW: Epson’s WF (WorkForce) series of multi-function printers has a document feeder that works hand-in-hand with VueScan.
Yes, the Standard version (i.e. one up from Basic) for $49 has this.
Well, Acrobat OCR is not terribly well regarded and at subscription prices of $240 per year a little bit of a tall order.
Wiki has an interesting comparison of OCR engines.
I’ve had good results from MacOS’s built-in OCR, as well as Textify from the App Store. The latter will auto-detect the language to scan, or you can specify it (e.g. Ukrainian vs. Russian). It will accept pasted images and photos. It will also allow you to save the text to a plain-text file. And no data collected!
If you’re not set on a multi-function printer but want first class scanning with OCR - that’s Mac friendly - consider the Brother ADS-1350W portable sheet-feed scanner which is fast, scans both sides of a sheet, and can save the scan - OCRed - in rtf or text format.
I scanned a 200 page two-sided document - up to 20 sheets at a time - and saved as an rtf document maintaining the format. Some limited cleanup was needed. But the speed and quality was a wonder.
It’s the wirecutter.com pick for a portable scanner.