Preview in Ventura apparently now does OCR on PDF files?

[DoctorFedora]

Haven't seen anyone mention this anywhere else yet, but it seems like Preview in Ventura can do "live text" OCR not only in image files, but also in PDF files (like, that don't have embedded text). I guess the next big question is, is there some way to bake the OCRed text into the PDF file itself with Preview, for use in other software…

EDIT: Looks like you can! The "Save As…" dialog box has an "embed text" checkbox for PDFs. Holy heck is this ever a useful feature to have.

 

[chabig]

Pretty neat. Monterey's Preview does the OCR but I don't see an option to embed the text.

 

[Kontikonsumi]

That is freaking awesome (!!) If anyone has preview about this new feature or a blog posst etc I would love to see it.
My macbook doesnt support anything above Monterey anymore.

So basically this is the similiar feature, which we know from Evernote, wehre Evernote could OCR the pictures in our notes right?
i love this feature and it will be so useful, finding texts in pictures through a apple spotlight search. (probably will also upgrade my mac due to this feature...)

 

[zapster]

I see no "Save As ..." option under the File menu. There is "Save As ..." under File>Export with a checkbox for Embed Text but it doesn't seem to OCR anything. Probably just includes text that's already there.

 

[svenmany]

I see no "Save As ..." option under the File menu. There is "Save As ..." under File>Export with a checkbox for Embed Text but it doesn't seem to OCR anything. Probably just includes text that's already there.

Hold the option key when opening the File menu.

 

[gilby101]

I guess the next big question is, is there some way to bake the OCRed text into the PDF file itself with Preview,

Seems to be a two step process to convert an image into a PDF with OCR layer.

1) Open an image in Preview and Export as PDF. Produces PDF containing the image.
2) Open the PDF and Save As... with embed text. Produces PDF containing the image and an OCR layer.

Not complaining. The quality is very good.

That is freaking awesome

Yes it is. Accurate and fast.

But:

As you are probably aware, Spotlight now indexes the text all images. So none of this is needed (like it used to be) if your reason for OCR was to make images (and PDFs with images) searchable by Spotlight.

You really wouldn't want to purchase a PDF product just for its OCR capability (as you might have done a year or so ago).

 

[zapster]

Hold the option key when opening the File menu.

Thanks. Option key does indeed bring up Save As with the "Embed Text" checkbox but it doesn't appear to OCR anything, at least not in the pdf document that I had.

I gave up and bought an app from the Mac App Store. The store had 25 OCR apps. Most were in-app purchases which I try to avoid (they rarely turn out to be the bargains they seem plus they can’t be shared with my family) leaving a handful of apps with prices from $4 to over $100. The $4 one (Elucidate) says it was written by a university student who had a lot of huge manuscripts to search and had pretty good reviews, one reason being the UI was super simple. I bought it. It chewed through a 350 page doc in 60 seconds on M1 Studio and gave me a searchable PDF. Whew!