PDFScanner - Scanning and OCR App Reviews

I use this app to scan my law school readings and then copy and paste the techincal material into my notes instead of having to retype everything. It’s been great for at least a year, as long as I’ve been using it, but in the last two or so months it keeps quitting on me everytime something has finished OCRing and then I lose the work. It’s a gamble everytime. I updated to Sierra hoping this would solve the problem, but nope. If they can fix this, it’ll be a five star app again. For now, it’s not useable.

I have been using this software for several years, mostly because I found its built in “reduce quality/file size” functionality to be very good. However, after this most recent update, I am unable to obtain anything approaching a reasonable file size. I have a 60 page PDF previously scanned that is 14Mb in size at the medium quality level from prior versions. However, 10 new pages of the same type of document at the very low quality results in a file size over 5Mb. This is a very disappointing development.

This app was working just fine until the 2 recent updates. Currently, it can communicate with my scanner, but the app no longer displays what was scanned nor generate any PDFs; it’s now useless.

For text documents and most illustrations it works great. It is not always the best for scanning photographs. Overall it has most of the features you probably want: OCR, cropping, rotating, and deskew (realign the page). It is my top go-to software for scanning.

I did have a issue earlier that it would not connect to my scanner but it was Apple’s fault. Seems they needed to update their dorvers for my scanner. Maybe it was Eson’s fault. Anyway it works now so I am happy. I love that it makes the pdf’s smaller in size not so large that they takeup too much space.

Ever since I upgraded to Sierra, I am having so many issue with scanning documents! The Apple Image Capture now only scans the first page of a stack of documents, making me have to scan each and every page separately. So I thought this app may fix it. But this app can’t even find my scanner! This is Incredibly Frustrating! *** I retract this last statement! It was a misconfiguration issue. Once I got that going, it works great now! I can do multiple pages again! YEAH!

Don’t buy this application. This is extremly slow, I wasted 1 hour to scan 8 pages and when I tried to save the document it literally lost everything I scanned except for the very last page. In other words, I needed to spent 1 hour again to scan everything and needed to save page by page to make this work. 14 bucks for all this stress???? How do I get my money back???? Don’t waste your money.

I’ve only been using PDFScanner for about 24 hours, so I’m giving it 4 stars subject to adding a 5th. I purchased this software because the native scanning software was making fat, bloated PDF files. Anything over a few pages long was too large to send via regular email. I got this software and as soon as it installed, I was scanning from my Epson GT-S50. I tested on a 103p document which scanned just over 4MB. Before PDFScanner, the file might have been 40MB. Caveat: As of October 19-2016, I have only scanned a handful of documents, but I have had 2 strange occurrences—both involving blank pages. I did not see a double feed scan error nor did the page appear blank while in the native PDFScanner screen, but upon saving the PDF, I had 2 documents with blank pages. On one the first page was blank. On the other it was about half way through. At this point it could well have been a scanner feed error, so I’m reserving a star until my testing is complete. I have started paying strict attention now, and will revise this review one way or the other.

I was looking for a simple, useful App to scan in documents from my Samsung multifunction printer. This App didn’t work at all, couldn’t get it to find/recognize the printer, and when I went online for help the help page wasn’t up and running. I have no way to fix the problem. Look elsewhere!!

I initially purchased this app to scan in paper documents using my flatbed scanner a few years ago. But with the advent of higher resolution smart phones and IOS apps like Scannable (Evernote) and Scanner Pro (Readdle), I no longer use my flatbed scanner. I now find myself using PDFScanner to open PDF files that I’ve printed from web pages, etc… and harness it’s very respectable and inexpensive OCR feature. Just select all pages in the left bar (Command-A) and (Command-Shift-O) to perform the OCR function and save. As some of you probably already know, dedicated OCR apps can be very expensive and this little app humbles those expensive OCR apps.

How nice to find an app that does exactly what it says it does! I got a bunch of scanned book chapters as readings for a class. I was able to use PDFScanner to split them into separate pages, straighten the pages, and use OCR to recognize the text. Now I can read them, highlight them, and write notes on them in Preview, on my iPad or on my Mac, as I wanted to. If this is the sort of problem you are trying to solve, this program does the job and does it well.

I have an Epson GT-S50 sheetfeed scanner which works quite well, but the Epson Scansoft app that comes with it is a real dog. I have to keep moving the mouse to keep it scanning, for a start. This app scans straight to PDF and does OCR on the fly. It also lets me name the file anything I want to. What a cool idea! :-)

This program worked with amazing ease. It was intuitive to use and succeeded scanning by connecting to my Canon desktop injet immediately. I was please with out well it worked for my project. I give it a high ranking for it’s user friendliness.

Simple and easy to use. Does what its suppose to do! Only improvement would be an option to OCR just the first page. Otherwise, this is a great app for PDF and OCR.

This app sets itself up and then it just works. The simultaneous scan and OCR is GREAT. I’ve been struggling with buggy OS native and HP scan apps for years plus the equally buggy Adobe Acrobat OCR function. I never knew scanning could be so simple. Yay.

I appreciate its simple and fast user interface. It straightens the document and runs OCR so you can search document text later. Use it with Epson flatbed and Brother AIO. The scans are good and better that what I was getting using Preview.

PDF Scanner has a lot of handy features that make it an attractive alternative to Image Capture. OCR can be run automatically after each scan. That makes it possible to find scanned documents with Spotlight. Also, the ‘Fake Duplex’ feature is handy if you have a single-sided scanner but want to scan a double-sided doc. Finally, the one support request I had was promptly answered and I was directed to a feature I hadn’t noticed before, "automatic white correction”, which I needed to turn off so that all background colors were picked up.

I have been using this with a HP printer/scanner for quite a while now, on both PC and Mac platforms. Works very well, especially like the faux duplex facility. Only problem is that on the Mac, once in a while, the scanner stays in scanning mode, and the only way out is to close the program and get back in. Bit of a nuisance, but doesn’t happen often enough to complain about.

This has become my go-to scanner app. Use it every day and seems to perform seemlessly. Every blue moon I run into a glitch, but there’s no such thing as perfect. Just wish every app I purchase could be as useful!

I only need it to connect to my scanner and scan documents to save as PDFs. PDFScanner does the job well everytime. I like the clean interface. My scanner is an Epson Atisan 710 printer-scanner. It work with PDFScanner via USB or wifi.