Is anybody using .pdf to "searchable .pdf" software and could make a recommendation on which one to buy.

I am trying to get rid of as much paper files as I can and would like to convert my .pdf files to "searchable .pdf" files to make my Document Management a lot more effective.

I done a lot of searching and reading on the internet and have found the following software for the Mac:
- Abbyy FineReader
- Adobe Acrobat
- Readiris
- OmniPage
The concesus is that OmniPage is really good but fairly expensive $139.
Adobe Acrobat is also very good but is even more expensive $169
Abbyy FineRead is in the App Store at $99

I have started this journey by purchasing a Fujitsu ScanSnap s1300 which I have found is a good Document Scanner and comes with a "Customized" version of Fine Reader and will only handle the scanned input but will not convert existing .pdfs.

Suggestions?
DavidH

David, what are the sources of your existing PDFs? Most PDFs that I encounter (and I encounter many on a daily basis) are searchable... that is to say, the text is embedded in the document.

Generally, the only PDFs that will not be searchable are PDFs made by scanning images of text, and outputting as a PDF...

TO make those kinds of PDFs searchable, you'd need to run them through a program that does OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and OCR, while much improved from years ago, still produces many errors that require post-revision spellchecking.

In the past, when I've had to scan and OCR text, I used OmniPage for many years, and was quite happy with its performance and autocorrection. Readiris is a popular option.

Mark there are two main sources for most of my existing .pdfs.
a) Files that have been made by using Mac OS X "print to .pdf" function
b) the other source is scanned images from my HP All in One Scanner

Are the .pdfs created with the "print .pdf" function "searchable .pdf's?
I am pretty sure the HP All in One Scanner is not producing "searchable .pdfs" it is just an image. My HP did not come with OCR Software.

Thanks for the recommendation on OmniPage, too bad it is pretty pricey but I read that it is very accurate and does a good job. Perhaps I should invest in it.

DavidH

DavidH, yup - if OS X created it via Print--Save As PDF, the files should be searchable.

The HP AIO ones, though, likely not. FYI, VueScan (http://hamrick.com) (an amazing bit of software I had to purchase when my HP AIO stopped working under Snow Leopard) includes a decent OCR capability - you can download and try it out to see if it suits your needs - it's less expensive than OmniPage, though I suspect OmniPage would have the edge in features and accuracy, particularly for complex documents (columns, tables, etc.). BUT that's just a guess - I so rarely need to do OCR now, I couldn't give you an honest comparison between the two.