ABBYY FineReader Express is an OCR tool for your Mac. It allows you to convert scanned documents or digital photographs into editable files. For example, you can convert a few scanned pages into a text file that you can then edit as if it were written with Open Office. This tool should keep the formatting of your documents, but that is not always possible and, in all honesty, I haven't seen an OCR app that can do that perfectly.
When you launch ABBYY FineReader Express, you will see a list of tasks. From here you can convert an image to a text document, a spreadsheet document, an HTML document, or a searchable PDF file. You can also change the document's language from a drop-down list.
I tested this app by converting a text PDF file into a text document (the first option). The process took a little under a minute. The file I used had a few tables, some images, a few titles and some text. All the text that was in the file was easily recognized and rendered editable. The tables were conserved and they looked almost identical to the ones in the PDF file. The images were where they were in the original file. With some work I was able to recreate the PDF file in the RTF file that this tool created for me.
All in all, this tool works surprisingly well. It couldn't be easier to use and it is fast. It might be a little expensive, but the time that a good OCR tool can save you has no price.
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