If you’re trying to run a paperless office, the first step is getting your papers scanned into your Mac.
We recommend Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners as the easiest way to create a multi-page PDF from a stack of papers. The ScanSnap software has a built-in OCR feature, as described in the Importing From a Scanner section.
ExactScan and ViewScan also offer software that can perform OCR and works with many different types of scanners.
If your scanner software does not automatically do OCR, the second step is to use optical character recognition (OCR) to make the text in the scanned PDFs searchable and selectable. On macOS 13 and later, EagleFiler automatically uses Live Text to make scanned text selectable and copyable. On earlier versions of macOS, and to make such text searchable, you can use Smile Software’s PDFpen to add a text layer to your PDF. You can do this directly in PDFpen, but it’s easier to automate the process via AppleScript. To do this, download the OCR With PDFpen script in compiled format. There are several ways you can use this script:
Follow the instructions on the AppleScripting EagleFiler page, then save the script file into the folder to add the OCR With PDFpen command to the script menu. Then you can simply select PDF files in EagleFiler and choose OCR With PDFpen.
Use Script Editor to save the script as an application. Then drag and drop PDF files onto it to OCR them and then import them into EagleFiler.
Save the script as an application and set it as the target of your scanner’s software. Instead of having the scanner open new scans in Preview, have it open them with your script application. The scanned files will be run through OCR and then imported into EagleFiler.
Attach the script to a folder as a folder action and save files into that folder.
See also the Importing From a Scanner section.