gocr @0.49 (graphics)
Optical Character Recognition, converts images back to text

ocrad @0.21 (graphics)
ocrad is an optical character recognition program

ocropus @0.4-62bdc7b8be62 (textproc)
The OCRopus open source document analysis and OCR system

py31-djvubind @1.1.0 (python, graphics)
A tool to create highly compressed djvu files with positional ocr, metadata, and bookmarks

tesseract @3.00 (textproc, graphics, pdf)
Open source OCR engine

xmoto @0.5.9 (games)
X-Moto is a challenging 2D motocross platform game

Found 7 ports.
bash$
…
You could also try a bit of crippleware called: PDF OCR X.app
I find ocrad install via port works fine and is great for automating the process with the scripting language of your choice. See http://www.macports.org if you are not familiar with the terminal command “port”.

convert: unable to open image `SITES/9′: No such file or directory @ blob.c/OpenBlob/2411.

error messages. You might want to consider fixing this soft & releasing it; I’ve spent several hours trying to find a cheap / free OCR for mac that works, driving me crazy. There is an intel-only software out there but for us PPC users that’s no good. Anyway thanks for your efforts.

I’m afraid I don’t even have Mac with which to test this program any more!

If I remember correctly, I would install TakOCR into the /Applications folder and it would work. To use it I would just drag a PDF to the TakOCR icon and drop it on the icon. If that’s not working, I’m afraid I don’t know what to suggest.

Best of luck!

I wish you would post a tutorial of how to use it correctly. I got it to work, but I still have no idea what steps and pieces are essential.

Here are my steps:
1. Downloaded the TakOCR.pkg and installed on my Mac OS X 10.5.8 Macbook.
– When I run this, it open a window which I first thought was displaying errors. Then I dragged a pdf file twice to it. It accepts it the second time, and there is a “reluctant” four icon menu which sometimes appears. The options are zoom in, zoom out, download to Download folder, and Preview. None of these seem to help me convert my pdf file to text.

2. Downloaded and unzipped the full pacakge. Wasn’t ready to mix it in with lots of my production related stuff in /usr/local directory, so hand copied only /usr/local/share/ghostscript and /usr/local/share/fonts.
– This did nothing to change the behavior of the application package’s box mentioned in step 1.

3. Downloaded the tacocr.rb file to my home directory. I have ruby 1.8.7 installed on my machine. So I ran this file with the following command

~/tacocr.rb myinput.pdf > ocrtextoutput.html

- This magically created the parsed OCR.

Please explain this.

Thanks for the wonderful work you have done. I didn’t have to struggle with the compiles and makes.

Have you considered adding the formula to brew (homebrew) which will make this whole process a oneline command for anyone who has brew. Brew includes uninstall.

I made a screenshot from a text editor window with some sample text, which merely contains black characters on a white background without any visual obstacles whatsoever, and saved it into the file “pic1.png”.

I dropped pic1.png onto TakOCR. The result is a window with an empty text field!

Double-clicking TakOCR (without any file dropping, in progammer’s language “starting the program without any arguments”) returns the “Usage info” into the textfield, being equivalent to the command line “ocroscript recognize” (I’ve had a look into “/Applications/TakOCR.app/Contents/Resources/script”).