The odd thing is I don't really want to like Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. I can not say the same for the other programs. Acrobat 9 Pro OCR'd 99% of the text correctly, including '$', '#', and ' ' (spaces). This is all on one standard letter size document. For example, some of my utility bills have headers with typical 'to' and 'from' info, usage charts that run the width of the document, narrow columns on one side of the document, additional tables of varying columns and rows and then paragraphs. One of the ways Acrobat 9 Pro is better than others that I've tried is its ability to OCR documents with multiple and inconsistent formatting. It's a robust program and comes free with the ScanSnap S1500M. In the end, I installed Acrobat 9 Pro and found it works better than the others that I tried.

Instead I spent hours trying out various other OCR options. I initially hesitated to install Acrobat 9 Pro on my Mac due to the large amount of negative net chatter that I read. I also like to see the archived PDF's in the original color schemes so I scan using 'auto color detection'.Ĭurrently I use the free version of Evernote, though despite my initial reservation, Evernote functions great, so I'll likely upgrade to the 'yearly' option.

Also, Acrobat 9 Pro for Mac works great on my Mac running Lion (10.7.3). Save in a single folder on local hard drive titled something like 'OCR & Evernote'įile sizes are 1/10 or smaller of the original size and the Acrobat OCR is superior to ABBYY FineReader for Mac and PDF OCR X per my trials.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro for Mac (included with scanner)Ĥ.

My work flow includes the use of the following tools:

Abbyy finereader pro scansnap mac