PDFScanner makes scanning documents easy and fast

There are many applications for Mac OS X that allow scanning of images or text. Most of them are however complex, slow or not really suited for scanning documents or letters.

PDFScanner has been created with one simple task in mind: Scanning and archiving documents as quick and easy as possible, and making them findable with Spotlight search. PDFScanner supports the following features:

• Support for all scanners that are supported by the macOS Image Capture application
• Optical character recognition to make the document searchable, allow to find it via Spotlight and other search tools or copy the text
• Intuitive and fast user interface to reorder, delete or edit pages
• Fully automatic straightening of crooked pages (deskew)
• Full multithreading support. Scanning, OCR and straightening is done on multiple pages in parallel
• „Fake Duplex“ mode to simplify scanning of double sided documents without a duplex scanner
• Saving to PDF (optionally compressing the scan inside the PDF to save disk space)


The typical workflow for PDFScanner can be explained in a few words:

• Setup the scanner and scan options (see scanner settings). This is something that needs to be done very rarely, as the preferences are saved and restored on each start.

• Insert the document into the scanner and click the Scan button. PDFScanner will then automatically scan the document and add pages to the preview panel as they arrive (if you have an ADF scanner). As PDFScanner was designed with speed in mind from the beginning on, auto rotation and OCR will directly start as soon as the first page has been received from the scanner and done in the background. You can even reorder pages while other operations are still in progress.

• If you have a double sided document, turn it and click Scan again. Then, when all pages have arrived, click the „Fake Duplex“ button, which automatically reorders the document (click here for more info).

• Click save, select a destination and burn the original document as you will never need it again (just kidding).