OCR with UNPDF Pro?

I use UNPDF to convert PDF’s to text; of course, now I wish I’d bought PDFPen. Is there a way to modify the Applescript for OCR to make use of the software I’m using?

It doesn’t look like UNPDF is AppleScriptable, but it does seem to have a command-line tool that could be used to control it. It should be possible to modify the PDFpen script, although there would be some important differences. UNPDF does not output PDF files. You would have to pick an output format (e.g. Word or plain text), and then the output file would preserve the text but not the layout of the PDF. So maybe you’d want to keep the original PDF file, rather than replacing it as the PDFpen script does.

Thanks. UNPDF does produce Word versions that mimic the formatting of pdfs, so I may be okay in keeping the “replace” function. (Though the translations sometimes have errors, so perhaps not, on the other hand.)

With luck, Docudesk will soon provide true OCR capability for UNPDF for Mac, as it does for the PC version.

Or maybe I’ll just buy PDFPen …

Here’s a script that will OCR using UNPDF. I found that the OCR is not very accurate compared to PDFpen, though perhaps I didn’t configure it properly.

Wow, thanks.

Michael,

Is there anything I can do to get you to write a script for OCR PDF support for ABBYY’s FineReader for ScanSnap? :slight_smile:

It looks like you’ve already started another thread for this. It’s difficult for me to help with this since my ScanSnap didn’t come with ABBYY FineReader. I wonder how similar the Express product is.

Having started this thread, which has taken a turn from the original request, I should say that I’d discourage anyone from getting UNPDF, which I use very rarely, and encourage PDFPen instead, which is not only nice software but already well-integrated into Eaglefiler.