Scanning a document digitizes an image of a printed page, but doesn’t digitize the text on that page: you can’t search for a keyword or copy a relevant passage into another document. Optical Character Recognition programs interpret the scanned images, “see” the individual letterforms, and overlay that textual information over the image (a PDF “text layer”) so you can search and copy-paste the scanned document to your heart’s content. For example, search for “asymmetry” in this scanned page before and after OCR.

Adobe would love to charge you for OCR (built into Acrobat), but the best-in-class OCR engine — Google’s Tesseract, initially developed by HP in the 1980s — is free and open-source.

The issue is the interface: rather than being an end-user program like Acrobat, Tesseract is a tool for building an end-user program. My favorite program, OCRmyPDF, is a little better: it’s designed for end-users, but only end-users comfortable working at the command line.

Rather than navigating folders and running OCRmyPDF from Terminal, you can use Apple’s built-in Shortcuts (available with macOS 12 Monterey and later) to run OCR by right-clicking on a PDF in Finder.

Install OCRmyPDF

Unfortunately, this setup is a two-step process. Unlike an app you can download form the App Store or an installable *.pkg file you download and install from the internet, OCRmyPDF is distributed via a common macOS package manager, Homebrew. First you install Homebrew, then you use Homebrew to install OCRmyPDF.

You can install both from the command line, the most ancient way to interact with the machine you know and love. You might be used to mouse-navigated apps with buttons and menus; at the command line there’s nothing but text.

You type instructions (commands) and press enter to run them; as long as they’re cogent, the computer will obey! Below I’ve included the specific commands to run this way.

1. Open the application Terminal. You can search for it in Finder or find it at Applications → Utilities → Terminal.

2. Install Homebrew if you don’t have it.

   To check if you already have Homebrew installed, type which brew into Terminal and press enter. If you see an output like /opt/homebrew/bin/brew, you have Homebrew installed and you can proceed to step 3.

   If you see an output like brew not found, install Homebrew by copying the “Install Homebrew” command listed on brew.sh into your Terminal and pressing enter. As that installation process runs, it may prompt you for additional input or approval. You may also need to input your computer password.

   For a more detailed tutorial on installing Homebrew, see DigitalOcean’s ‘How To Install and Use Homebrew on macOS.’

   Once Homebrew is finished installing, confirm the installation: type brew --version into Terminal and press enter.

3. Install OCRmyPDF: type brew install ocrmypdf into Terminal and press enter.

It’s worth briefly touching on how to use OCRmyPDF from the Terminal. At any given time, the Terminal is operating in a certain folder on your computer — you can use the command pwd to see what folder you’re in, the command ls to list files and child folders from your current position, and the command cd to move into another folder.

When you’re in a folder with a PDF — let’s call it ‘my-scan.pdf’ — running ocrmypdf my-scan.pdf my-scan_ocr.pdf creates a new PDF (my-scan_ocr.pdf) with the same pages as my-scan.pdf, but with the searchable and copyable PDF text layer added.

Add a Shortcut

1. Install the “OCR PDF” Shortcut using this iCloud sharing link.¹

2. The last action, “Run Shell Script,” may come with a warning message: “This action cannot be run because Scripting actions are disabled.” Hit the ‘Open Preferences’ button, then ‘Allow Running Scripts.’

   

   

   Diving into advanced settings to toggle off a security-minded default might reasonably make you nervous: shell scripts are powerful tools, so in theory ‘Allow Running Scripts’ could let a malicious shortcut manipulate your computer. The good news is this script is short: it only runs OCRmyPDf, which is trustworthy.

3. Use the button in the upper-right-hand corner of the Shortcuts window to navigate to the ‘Shortcut Details.’ Check ‘Use as Quick Action’ and ‘Finder’ to add the “OCR PDF” action to your right-click menu.

   

Now you can run OCRmyPDF from Shortcuts! Use the ‘Play’ button in the upper-right of this window (it’ll prompt you to select a PDF) or right-click on a PDF and use Quick Actions → OCR PDF.

While your PDF is being processed, you’ll see a Shortcuts status indicator in the menu bar at the top of your screen. When it’s finished, look for a freshly OCR’d PDF in the same folder as the one you selected (if you right-clicked on ‘my-scan.pdf’, expect ‘my-scan_ocr.pdf’). This can take a few minutes for large files.

In retrospect, I wish I’d used OCR much more in college, when my course readings were often chapters scanned from university library books. I imagine it’s also a useful tool for working with big and relatively low-tech corpuses, like public records. Sure, a university student or a public records professional might have an institutional Adobe license, but we should expect more!

This technology has been in development since the mid-80s, and free for almost 20 years… if you’re the right kind of computer-user, comfortable writing your own scripts and troubleshooting at the command line. A consumer low-code app like Shortcuts, by providing a generic graphical interface for shell scripts, extends the same options to a wider range of users.