PDFScanner - Scanning and OCR App Reviews

I use this app frequently and it is simple and fast. I use a MacBook Air and run the app with a wireless connection to the print/scanner and mostly add documents to a database on our server. Scan quality is great.

I purchased this mainly for the OCR feature. That does work nicely by the way. I do like the UI and the overall operation and simplicity of the software. There are some neat filename options for saving files that will help perdict what you might name the file or setup standard things you name your files. The reason for the 4 out of 5 stars is the cropping feature. There is an auto crop feature (which I like to use) that doesn’t work properly. It crops too much into the file, to the point of cutting out a good chuch of information on each side of the scan. Once this feature gets fixed I would be happy to give it 5 stars.

I use this app to scan all my paperwork and it works great! I use it many times every week. There are two things that could be improved. Firstly, sometimes the app doesn’t bring up the save sheet for save selection, a defect I presume. In those instances it would be great if, (feature request) there was a list of recent items in the file menu. The recent items list would be great to have regardless. The autoexposure worked great on my old HP MFD, but on my new Epson MFD you get artifacts from the reverse side of the paper. Not sure if it’s the app or the scanner. Consitent behaviour across different manufacturers would be great.

My new Epson all-in-one is good in many things, but the scanner software must have been built in Redmond in the 80s. Most of what I scan is to create PDFs. The app gives me the amount of control I need, e.g., resolution, paper size. Deskewing works well. Strong value for the money. One suggestion: getting started wasnt intuitive. A quick pop-up to explain how to use the app would be helpful.

I’ve used this software for about a year and I find that it is very easy to use and does exactly what I need. I use this with an Epson WF3520 all in one printer. The software automatically picks up whether the document is in the feeder or on the glass. The process is very quick.

I was using an OCR web site (free), but this app raises the bar, like going from the dark ages to the age of enlightenment. To get the full benefit of the app, read all of the Help menu (Help/PDFScanner Help) and take notes. Then, practice using single sheet, multiple sheets, import file, etc. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but well worth it. One tip that isn’t all that obvious, PDFScanner will not convert documents in Landscape orientation. The work-around is go into the PDF document first and rotate the page(s) to Portrait. I use the Apple Preview app with thumbnails turned on, then save, quit and open PDFScanner, import the doc (File/Import) and then OCR the document (Edit/Recognize Text).

The app is simple, intuitive and useful. On larger scan jobs, it would sometimes crash, and losing what I had just scanned, and I would have to restart the app. Oddly enough it only happens with Brother scanners, but other apps I have used with those scanners don’t cause the same problem. Generally I like it

Though I already owned a PDF editor that costs six times as much as PDFScanner, I was initially attracted to the app because (as far a I can tell) its the only one on the market that can quickly and efficiently transform the two-page book scans that result when a book is placed face down on a scanner or photocopier into separate single page scans. While this may seem like a quirky requirement, it makes reading scanned books and articles considerably easier on my iPad and (at least for me) easily justified the reasonable price. Ive regularly used it to do new scans with my Canon 900F Mark II and have been consistently impressed by the speed and efficiency of the program. The interface is nicely designed and makes book scanning simple and the automatic deskewing feature does a great job of keeping the scans properly oriented. PDF Scanner makes my Canon behave like a dedicated book scanner at a fraction of the cost. The more I used it, the clearer it became that there was no reason to use any other PDF app. It outshines my more expensive PDF app when it comes to performing OCR: it does a better job and is much more reliable. It’s also much more stable and easily processes large pdfs (i.e., over 200 pages) that routinely crash other apps. There’s simply no reason to pay more: this is the best. Finally, the developer has been very responsive and quick to answer questions and offer help.

I rarely write reviews, but this product deserved it. Fast, simple to use and understand, and reasonably priced. I had used pdf scanning products in Windows for years with mixed results. I decided to try this product on my iMac to see if it might work better. My only regret — I wish I had tried it sooner!

I’ve used other scanner apps,this one is the one to get. It works, its easy and does what you need it to do.

Scan, OCR, and compression all work well. The app processed an existing 600 page PDF file, making it searchable, in about 14 minutes. The interface is fairly intuitive. Highly recommended to anyone who who has documents to scan or existing PDF files that they would like to make searchable.

Excellent app but it would perfect if has an option to save files with image formats

If you have any need to create PDF documents from scanned images, this is your app. Consistently great searchable PDFs with OCR text and simple to use. Love the "fake duplex" facility for easily handling the automatic document feeder.

Fantastic program, does exaclty what its adervitised to do, OCR PDFs. It handles documents that much more expensive programs choke on (PDFPen). Its simplicity is its strong point. The only request I have is that the developer makes an improvemnt to tracking the OCR progress. I have several files that are 30+ pages and it would be nice to have a progress bar. Also I would like to receive some type of notification when an OCR process is complete, i.e. notification center, bouncing dock icon, etc. Other than that it’s a great application.

I was really aggravated with the iOS printer/scanner software being overly complicated. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed like functionality changed with each operating system update. I finally got tired of fooling with it and chose PDFScanner. It’s simple, functional, and reliable. ‘Nuff said.

Every once in a while you come across some great software. Add this to the list. Simple, accurate, fast….

I use this app almost every day. It’s great

When it works, it works well - most of the time. But I find that over 50% of the time it fails to recognize the document even though the scanner does.

This is a great piece of software that never gives me any trouble. It scans and performs post scan functions very quickly.

I’m not using this to scan to PDF, but rather to take existing PDFs which were scanned in a while back and running OCR on them. Performance is good. It takes advantage of all the CPUs on my box according to Activity Monitor. It also doesn’t use a huge amount of memory - a few GB at peak. So, seems well tuned. Output performance is good too, churning through the pages quite quickly. With a 145 page, 8MB document with embedded graphics throughout it took about 3 minutes (tied with Elucidate for the fastest OCR app I’ve tried today). A 233-page, 20MB document (heavier on graphics) took 4.5 minutes (which was the fastest of all the OCR tools I’ve tried on that document today!) So, no qualms at all from the performance perspective. Output is spot-on with one caveat (missing table of contents navigation). After saving the document and opening up in Preview I am able to search all of the text that had been in images, and the highlight locations match exactly the locations in the formerly straight-image PDF pages. Even the pages that scanned in at about a 15-degree skew were properly OCR’d and the highlights appear in the correct spots (the text in the graphic angles up, and the highlight for each line goes directly across, so on the right edge there isn’t a great match, but it is completely workable when searching for text). Missing: * After saving as a PDF again, the table of contents from the original PDF is missing. That is, if you show the “Table of Contents” in the Preview sidebar, where before there might have been chapters and subchapters now there is just the name of the file indicating no saved table of contents. Not sure why, but this seems endemic with the PDF processing tools I’ve used today. * Progress indicator while running OCR on a long document would be nice * Single-click “OCR this whole document” button (at first I used the “Recognize Text (OCR)” menu item and was astounded how fast it was; that was because it only ran the first page through OCR) [Edit: I found an “Automatically start OCR when opening existing files” option in preferences, which completely negates this quibble] * No batch mode Definitely wish this had been the first PDF OCR tool I had purchased today!