EXPERT ADVICE
Our resident genius Howard Oakley solves your Mac and iOS problems
Will Live Text read our PDFs?
THERE’S MORE TO Live Text than meets the eye.Although normally seen at work in its quick mode interactively recognizing snippets of text in our photos, it can also work more slowly and accurately.
That’s been built into a new generation of third–party apps to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on scans and images of printed documents.
For the moment, macOS doesn’t appear to use this to automatically extract text. If you have PDFs containing many scanned pages that haven’t been converted using OCR in an app, those won’t be quietly turned into text you can search with Spotlight.
One challenge that remains is the multi–column page that needs to be analyzed into blocks so that its contents don’t get muddled. Don’t be surprised to see Apple add that in the not too distant future.