There are many applications for OS X 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, and making them findable with Spotlight search.

When performing OCR, PDFScanner adds the recognized text directly to the scanned image as an invisible layer, so the text can be selected and copied just like in other PDF files.

PDFScanner supports the following features:

• Support for all scanners that are supported by the OS X Image Capture application (please check that using the scanner in Image Capture works before purchasing to be sure)

• Optical character recognition to make the document searchable, allow to find it via Spotlight and other search tools or copy the text.

• Supported OCR languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish

• Intuitive and fast user interface to reorder, delete or edit pages

• Fully automatic straightening of crooked pages (deskew)

• Full multithreading support. Scanning, OCR and straightening is done on multiple pages in parallel and you can even reorder or delete pages while PDFScanner is still working

• „Fake Duplex“ mode to simplify scanning of double sided documents without a duplex scanner

• Saving to PDF (optionally compressing the scan inside the PDF to save disk space).

• Customizable file name patterns (include for example date, time and machine name in the filename)

• It is also possible to open or import existing PDF documents and perform OCR on them via a menu option (the language can be set in the Preferences).


PDFScanner runs on OS X Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion and is only available on the Mac App Store.