How to OCR a PDF on Mac (Make a Scan Searchable)

By NUR Technologies · October 28, 2026 · 5 min read

A scanned PDF is just pictures of pages: you cannot search it or copy its text. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the pictures and gives you the words. Here is how to do it on a Mac without uploading your documents.

What macOS can do on its own

Recent versions of macOS can recognize text in images and in many scanned pages (Live Text), so in Preview or Quick Look you can often select and copy it. That is handy for grabbing a paragraph. It is not the same as producing a new, searchable PDF file you can share.

OCR with Rivet

Rivet has a Text and OCR tool with two engines, both on your Mac: Apple Vision, built in, which covers the languages your macOS includes (European languages, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and more), and PaddleOCR, which downloads its language models once the first time you use it.

1. Open Text and OCRDrop the scanned PDF on Rivet and choose Text and OCR.
2. Choose an engine and languagePick Apple Vision or PaddleOCR and the language of the document.
3. Pick the outputMake a searchable PDF (an invisible text layer is added and the pages are not recompressed), or get just the text to copy or save as .txt.
4. SavePress the main button.

Good to know

• The first time you use OCR, Vision can take a while to prepare its models; afterwards it is fast.
• PaddleOCR reads horizontal text only.
• You can run OCR over a whole folder with Rivet’s Batch mode.