Elucidate

I've found Elucidate very useful. It's a front-end for the Tesseract engine. It can handle most pdfs, but fails with some poorly-scanned pdfs. It outputs a new pdf file, with a new text layer, so it's relatvely easy to check the text against the pdf. Unfortunately, it processes the output through Quartz, so it isn't entirely compatible with some other pdf tools.

As part of my academic work, I scan and collect tons of PDFs of various articles and books. If these PDFs are searchable in MacOS Preview, it facilitates my research process, allowing me to query, cite, and quote documents quickly. Unfortunately, many of the documents that I collect, especially those from JSTOR or ones that I scan myself, lack automatic text searchability in Preview. I run into this problem about ten times a day. ELUCIDATE SOLVED MY PROBLEM. I now use Elucidate to convert these unsearchable PDFs into searchable ones. The operation is as simple as drag and drop. The advanced features in preferences are killer too! I am especially fond of the addition of various language dictionaries (I use German and English at the same time). The file overwrite-after-convert option is great as well. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the developer, who has been so responsive to all of my questions about the application’s functionality. I look forward to working with this application for years to come, as it is now an integral part of my daily workflow. I would pay ten times the asking price for this app. 10/10 would purchase again!

I have been looking for a cheap solution for OCR for a while, particularly one that did not include uploading to a website. I’ve beenreally pleased with this solution and hope that it continues to improve. Feature Request: It would be great to see separate status bars for each PDF that I am OCR’ing. Currently, when I drop additional documents into the app, at least when one is already OCR’ing, I can only see the one status bar. It seems to have a little bit of trouble with OCR’ing multiple documents at the same time, but for the price, I can’t justify knocking off a star.

I've used Elucidate for a few years now. It's been great when I want to copy something out of a PDF that wasn't generated with embedded text. App is tiny but powerful. Super simple to use - just drag and drop. In my configuration I have it set to just overwrite the original file with all the OCR text now in place and have it searchable. Had a glitch when I upgraded to Catalina and the developer responded immediately. This is an app that “just works.” Can’t endorse this app and developer highly enough.

I need this for my multifunction device, whose OCR app is no longer supported. I was able to hook it into the workflow such that I can perform OCR scans directly from the device. Elucidate quickly and accurately converts documents with the flexibility of specifying the saved file location. I don't need a full blown PDF editor. I simply need a tool to create a searchable PDF. Elucidate is perfect for that!

Okay, whoa. For the longest time of been using a much more expensive piece of software, that won't be named. *cough* rhymes with kenobi *cough* I just needed to make a PDF word searchable man, how hard could that be? Well suprisingly there's like no inexpensive options. EXCEPT THIS AMAZINGNESS. To summarize, I just put a 600 page pdf of scanned records and it took about 5 minutes to turn into a word searchable pdf. The other more expensive option would literally take hours and would sometimes just crash halfway through. Dear developer, thank you so FREAKING MUCH for this. You are a wonderful person.

Pleased to see 1) I could buy this outright instead of in-app purchases and 2) it received a recent update so it's still supported. I wanted to analyze the 2020 tax returns of a president (who shall rename nameless to protect the guilty). Elucidate OCR'd 350 pages in 60 seconds on my M1 Mac Studio. Breathtakingly easy to use.

While the interface is pretty barebones, I got better results from the OCR in Elucidate than I did from Adobe Acrobat Pro. That’s impressive. I did have to take the extra step to open a PNG of the source image (a screen capture of a data table at 72 ppi) in Preview and export it as a PDF, before giving it to Elucidate. Accuracy: it missed only two ligatures (‘hi’ became ’n’, also missed an ‘fi’ ligature) but that’s it. Features I’d pay for as in-app purchase would be importing a wider variety of filetypes and exporting options other than PDF such as rich text and xlsx or csv.

I’m trying to make scans of old newspqper articles and documents searchable for use in our local historical society. This OCR software was hit and miss. Didn’t do as good a job as one of the free online converters I tried. Misses most of the references in the document. Glad I didn’t pay much for it.

Sometimes screenshots have to be feed thru the program 2 to 3 times before successful conversion.

Easy to understand

I took a screenshot of a perfect black and white 600 resolution document and the program simple created a pdf exactly as the original. No text recognition; just the same image.

This app is making frequent encrypted outgoing network connections.

Does the job exactly as described: OCRs my PDFs

Did not work on my image based pdf

Best OCR software for Mac!

crap

I have a mid 2015 iMac that pretty much rocks anything it tries to do. However, when I used this app to OCR a 400+ page pdf of a book (only text) it pretty much shut my mac down for an hour running it. I couldn’t get anything else to function, it was more debilitated that I’ve ever seen. Now, if I had a great ocr’d pdf at the end of this process, sure, ok, that would be fine. Instead, I get a pdf with twice as many false positives (a lot of them in completely blank areas) as actual hits when I start running word searches. So, yeah, no thanks. It’s not worth the $4. Hail Hydra.

I was amazed. Used a 10 page single spaced (revised from normal 2 line plead) court plead. Compared OS X pages search with a print of its pdf scanned back into El Capitan (not best, only good pdf) , elucidate scored 100 % on 3 different word searches. WOW this is a world beater bargain. Go to its preferences and you can save the OCR result in plain text. For search can’t do better. Hope for future >> save OCR format as well as text.

Of course, I’m not referring to the rather spartan user interface, but what it does, and for the price! I use it all the time for making large PDFs I download for university searchable and more importantly, highlightable (and copyable). It is much faster, more accurate, and cheaper than several other apps I have purchased and used on the app store.

A very affordable application that does exactly as desribed. It may be slow in its processing time, but the price reflects this. The following are three examples of input/output with this application: 1) Input: 40 page pdf at 1.4 MB; Output: 5.6 MB searchable pdf, processing time = 10 minutes. 2) Input: 688 page pdf at 16 MB; Output: 609.3 MB searchable pdf, processing time = 4 hours. 3) Input: 1376 page pdf at 250.1 MB; Output: 517 MB searchable pdf, processing time = 2 hours.

Works great, tested on 10 scans, 300DPI and some multipage .Dropped the PDF’s onto the application window, the program converted and saved them back to their original locations. They are now searchable from Spotlight search in OS X. Perfect, this is exactly what I was looking for.

I snapped pics of four pages from a book using my iPhone 6S. Pics were high quality, converted to PDF, also high quality and easy to read. Elucidate didn’t find most of the text, and it wasn’t searchable. Oh well! I’m asking Apple for a refund.

I paid the money, installed it and I can’t make it work! I tried to drop in the PDF or choose and open, and in both scenarios, the app crashed every single time. Dissapointed.

The app crashes once I drag the pdf file. Its a horrible app and a waste of $4. Don’t purchase

Worked pretty fast, converting a 233-page, 20MB graphics-rich document in just about six minutes. During those six minutes it took advantage of all four of my CPUs and about 50GB of system memory (the “You are out of memory; force quit apps” dialog popped up during this process). The output looks good, but the inserted “text” layer is significantly misplaced on each page. The Table of Contents data is completely gone. When I search for text that is both in embedded graphics and in the straight text I get a few oddities: 1. I *almost always* get two “hits” for a word that is in the text - one for the original visible text, and another slightly offset for the invisible text layer the OCR engine inserted. So, for a straight text document expect twice as many hits as usual. Strangely, sometimes I only get one hit; I suspect this is when the searchable text layer happened to line up exactly with the original text layer. 2. For text embedded in graphics, the text comes up (yay!) but is often significantly offset and of a different size than the embedded text. For instance, I search for “tester” in a service manual and one of the hits shows that word in about 40 point font in the middle of the page, where the actual instance of it is off to the left a little in around 10 point type. My second attempt was a full-graphics PDF with 49 pages; this took about 1 minute to churn through. Similar to the first PDF, though, the locations of the searchable text layer is way way off. If I search for text on the bottom part of the page it is never found, presumably because the searchable text layer is offset so much that it falls off the bottom of the page. The results are almost usable, but I am going to keep looking for a PDF OCR tool that functions well.

It does a much better job than rendered by a mere Cmd > A, Copy, open my favorite wordprocessor app to Paste the results and it never seems to work right doing it that way. Maybe it's the wordprocessor's engineering. I much prefer to use Elucidate because it usually gets 99-100% complete transfer of the text from PDF to an editable format for me. I use it on my own PDFs when I have difficulty locating some older files not listed in the recent history. I love it. Thanks folks, Dave, of Arkansas

I downloaded this to view a list of candidates for local office. The Registrar of Voters list was scanned so it was not searchable. Since the office I wanted was buried on pages 178-79 of 198, this app saved me a ton of time and it worked perfectly. Thanks!