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Free scanning software (as in scan documents from a flatbed scanner)
- Thread starter otherguy5
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I just go into System Preferences - Printers and Scanners and scan from there. Don't know if it is using the same scan engine as Image Capture in the background. It is good enough to scan sheet music into PDFs and join pages into a single document. Photos were really good with my old scanner, but not great with my current scanner. I'll put that on the scanner itself, though.
Image Capture works really well for me. I get there in Preview > File > Import. PDFs are PDFs. There is nothing about the scanning software that makes a document editable/OCR readable or not. You just need appropriate editing/OCR software. When I require those things I generally turn to PDFPen Pro.
It's not free ($50), but I use VueScan. I've been using it for years and I've had great experiences with it. I like that it has the option to create multi-page PDFs as you scan. There's a free trial available so you can test it to see how well it works.
PDFScanner (by Felix Rotthowe)
I've used this app for 5+ years. It's fairly minimal in function yet gives features like cropping & OCR. The developer actively and regularly maintains it. It's exactly what I was looking for in a scanning app. I even use it to consolidate multiple PDFs into one more easily than through macOS.
PDFScanner - Scanning and OCR
There are many applications for macOS that allow scanning of images or text. Most of them are however complex, slow or not really suited for scanning documents or letters. PDFScanner has been created with one simple task in mind: Scanning and archiving documents as quick and easy as possible...
apps.apple.com
I've used this app for 5+ years. It's fairly minimal in function yet gives features like cropping & OCR. The developer actively and regularly maintains it. It's exactly what I was looking for in a scanning app. I even use it to consolidate multiple PDFs into one more easily than through macOS.
