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.
You can also use third-party software to perform OCR and bake a text layer into the PDF. This will make the text selectable, copyable, and also searchable. There are many apps that can do this. We have some scripts to help automate the process:
You can also use apps such as PDF Gear and PDF Owl and the open-source Tesseract.
See also the Importing From a Scanner section.