If you've bought a scanner in the last few years then chances are you already had some pretty nifty OCR software on the disc it came with! As Mac users, we're sometimes spoilt by the fact that we hardly ever need to worry about installing drivers so software on the same discs is often ignored. OCR technology has been around for quite a while but it's an often understated feature that is usually never even looked over. This also applies even if you chose to save it as a PDF as you won’t be able to (yet) select any text.

Whenever you scan a document, the scanner itself has no way of knowing what the difference between text and an image is, so everything you scan is effectively an image. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition.

If you'd prefer to use a traditional scanner to scan your documents, read on for the full details of how to do that.

Update: You can also easily scan documents with OCR technology via your iPhone, by using the new DocScan app on Envato Market (no longer available). In this guide we’ll show you five different apps that can convert documents you’ve scanned into fully searchable ones using a technology called OCR. If you’ve been spurred to try and move towards a paperless office then you’re not alone! 2013 is the year of going paperless and that doesn’t just mean scanning those old receipts and correspondence, it’s fully digitising them too.

Open source ocr for mac os x