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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

PDFs can be concatenated using Preview.

Preview can do a whole lot more than that! It can reorder pages, edit pictures, has ocr, can insert signatures and a host of other things.

I find that whenever I am not on MacOS, I am missing preview and there just isn't any substitute for it.

Preview can OCR? That’s the one feature I have been missing from Acrobat Pro.

Yes. I just tested it to verify on this gif

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/digital/...

https://imgur.com/a/oHUM5J7

I just scanned an invoice to pdf via a Brother MFC printer/scanner, and I cannot highlight any of the text in it in Preview. How can I run OCR on this document in Preview? I do not see any menu option or anything in Help menu.

Only works on latest macOS. Also you have to wait a bit for the OCR to take place and there are no indication whatsoever the system is working on it. When it’s done, you can simply select the text.

I've never gotten OCR to work on scanned pdfs. PNG files / screenshots - instant ocr. Very bizarre behavior.

I have had this pdf open in Preview for 30+ min in the latest macOS. I think this is the Live Text functionality mentioned in other comments, but it does not work on PDFs, only images and whatnot.

I think it also requires a M1 processor.

No, that was the early betas but by final release it works on Intel too. I believe if it runs Monterey, it can do LiveText.

The feature is called Live Text, and it was released in macOS Monterey.

I do not see any indication that Live Text has functionality to perform OCR on PDFs.

https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/interact-with-text-in...

I wish Preview didn't have the annoying rubber-band (elastic) effect when scrolling horizontally.

You can do it in finder too. Preview lags hard when combining and saving big pdfs.

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