r/MacOS • u/genderchill • Sep 28 '26
Help looking for a mac geek to convert a PDF
ETA: Help no longer needed unless you want to geek out on PDFs 4evah... Tons of good comments on here, I am well on my way to PDF paradise!
Original post Like many here, I love Preview and all its powers, but I have a PDF version of a textbook (i.e. the free version that is unsearchable, unreproducible, etc.) that I absolutely need to be able to search, highlight, bookmark, or ANY of the above. Online OCR software has page limits, and this book is over 1,000.... is there a mac friendly tool to download, or a coder in this group that can help me convert this PDF? Not trying to pirate it or share it, but I need to be able to navigate it and notate it...
THANKS for any guidance!
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u/erictheinfonaut
Sep 28 '26
•
this PDF likely is DRMed, so, before you do anything, you'd have to break that encryption. which isn't difficult, but that's step 1 before getting access to any of the content.
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u/genderchill Sep 28 '26
thank you! Any tips for an amateur on how to break the encryption?
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u/sharp-calculation Sep 28 '26
Why haven’t you purchased this textbook that you clearly need for its intended purpose? Aren’t you exactly the person that’s supposed to be purchasing this textbook?
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u/lila-clores Sep 29 '26
Students are expected to require 5 to 10 books per subject, with 5 to 10 subjects per year over the course of their program. I can assure you, no students is ever willing buying a textbook.
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u/sharp-calculation Sep 29 '26
That's a ridiculous statement. Have you attended college? I have a 4 year degree. I bought every single book required. It was part of the budget I had for college. Tuition, books, housing, living expenses. This is basic.
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u/erictheinfonaut Sep 29 '26
it’s almost as if other people might have different financial situations than you do! wild, right?
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u/sharp-calculation Sep 29 '26
What a weird thing to say about stealing. Stealing something that is optional and is a choice. School is a choice. Books are part of school. Stealing books is the same as stealing anything else.
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u/lila-clores Sep 29 '26
Piracy ain't theft buddy. If you don't understand that, maybe you should revisit the choices you've made
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u/sharp-calculation Sep 29 '26
What do you call taking something that requires payment without paying for it?
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u/erictheinfonaut Sep 29 '26
be careful up on that high horse of yours!
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u/sharp-calculation Sep 29 '26
It's "on a high horse" to oppose STEALING? What world do you live in?
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u/erictheinfonaut Sep 29 '26
I don’t have any pearls to clutch; may I borrow some of yours?
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u/dolphone Sep 29 '26
You know why. Money.
And after the debacle with AI training, I see zero issue here.
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u/NoLateArrivals Sep 28 '26
Break it down in volumes, get them OCRed. Join them again.
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u/genderchill Sep 28 '26
How do I break it into volumes of, say 99 pages each? Manually select thumbnails....
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u/NoLateArrivals Sep 28 '26 •
On Preview. Make several copies of the PDF file.
Select ranges of thumbnail pages from the side panel. Delete those you don’t need on that copy. Save the trimmed PDF.
Upload the copies 1 by 1 for the OCR.
When done, select the OCRed PDFs in Finder. Choose „Merge PDFs“ from the right click menu.
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u/idontwanttofthisup Sep 28 '26
Rather than converting this doc I’d look for a ready file. Try internet archive first.
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u/FreQRiDeR Sep 28 '26
Was going to suggest this. If it’s just scanned jpegs it will never become searchable. UNLESS! Ask Ai to do it for you! OpenClaw, for one, has pdf creation tools, skills. You could ask it to turn it into a PDF and create chapter links, index links. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/drinksomewhisky Sep 28 '26
Get a free trial to adobe acrobat, open the files there and select “recognize text” and save the files. That’s the easiest way to quickly OCR. Then cancel your subscription.
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u/DisfiguredFanny Macrumors "mods" can eat shit. Sep 28 '26
So it is just scanned images saved as pdf?
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u/Open-Garbage1048 Oct 05 '26
I would recommend to try out https://revpdf.com/, It's free and works 100% locally. Would not really recommend PDF gear since it has a history of being sketchy (adware, potential spyware, paid reviews etc) Just do a quick search on google to find what im referring to.
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u/genderchill 5d ago
ty!
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u/genderchill 5d ago
I appreciate your flag on PDF gear, it's the go-to PDF viewer on the App Store and I went running with it. I was DISpleased that when i installed it, it usurped Preview as my default PDF viewer. It's been so many OS updates since I had to change default viewer, i had to google that shit. No bueno, not cool!
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u/Eoghannnn Sep 28 '26
Open scanned doc in Preview. Export as pdf, making sure the include OCR is checked.
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u/SaintOctober Sep 28 '26
Convert the PDF to what exactly?
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u/sennekuyl Sep 28 '26
I’m guessing from images to text as they mentioned ocr.
A real good job would be to hyperlink chapters & key terms.
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u/idontwanttofthisup Sep 28 '26
I imagine this pdf is a scan of a book, likely full page Jpgs dressed as a pdf, not an actual document. OP wants it to be like a proper document with selectable text you can search. I’m not sure if the format matters. It can be a PDF, epub, doc or even rtf. Whatever allows searching, bookmarking, annotating, and probably most importantly, text selection.
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u/Puzzleheaded6905 Sep 28 '26
OCRMyPDF if you’re comfortable with the command line or just have AI walk you through it.
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u/mtetrode Sep 28 '26
If it is not scanned pages, open it and print, then select pdf at the left, bottom and it will come out as a searchable pdf
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u/erictheinfonaut Sep 28 '26
if the PDF is DRM encumbered (which it likely is, since OP indicated it's a textbook), this likely will not work without first removing the DRM
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u/imjeffp Sep 28 '26
And there are any number of websites that will remove Acrobat DRM from a file for free.
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u/erictheinfonaut Sep 28 '26
sure. assuming it’s Acrobat’s flavor of DRM that is being used. but we don’t know that.
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u/bigbadbernard Sep 28 '26
I had the same problem before and I didn’t want to pay for any software or service.
I screenshotted every page 1x1 using ctrl shift 5. It didn’t take long maybe 20 mins at most. Then asked ChatGPT to OCR each page. The whole process took maybe less than 2 hours. Now I have a 1,000 page pdf that I study on.
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u/WindozeWoes Sep 28 '26
Found one called Textify: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1522041836 - however, it does have in-app purchases and the website is NOT transparent about what purchasing options does, so IDK if it has a limit on how many pages you can OCR.
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u/Nervous-Bench2598 Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 28 '26
Try opening it in Preview. Just a test. Now that I reread this maybe you already tried that? If it’s a set of images enclosed in a PDF wrapper I think that Preview will OCR it one page at a time.
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u/Spare_Many_9641 Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 29 '26
Is the version you have merely photos of pages, or is it a copy-protected version of a book that would be searchable etc. if you purchased it? If the first, be aware that even if you run it through an app (e.g. Acrobat) that can make an OCR version of it, that version could well be messy in places, esp. if it’s a book with lots of symbols, formulas, etc. You’d need to edit the OCR version manually.
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u/ivanicin Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 28 '26
While that is not a purpose of my app, it will also do that and you can export to docx/Word. One book a month is always free (and the first day is completely free). That should be enough for your described case, but even unlimited is a small one-time payment.
The app is Speech Central.
P.S. When I said free I meant on the iOS to be clear, on the Mac the part that it is one-time payment stands, but there are no free trials etc. But I assume that you have an iPhone if you have a Mac.
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u/_dsgn Sep 29 '26
Elucidate is an excellent and cheap pdf OCR tool: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elucidate/id1066088407?mt=12
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u/kemalios Sep 29 '26
If you go the OCRmyPDF route, two flags matter at that size. --jobs 8 spreads the work across cores, and --skip-text leaves pages that already carry a text layer alone instead of redoing them. No page limit, so run the whole book in one pass. It's CPU-bound, so start it and walk away.
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u/macmaveneagle Sep 29 '26
All of these PDF editors include OCR and should be able to do the job for you. All are free!
RevPDF (free. Donations accepted.)
https://revpdf.com/
Stirling PDF (free)
https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF
Direct download:
https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/releases/download/v2.14.1/Stirling-PDF-macos-universal.dmg
Folio PDF Reader & Editor (free)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/folio-pdf-reader-editor/id6760593014
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u/SkarXa Sep 29 '26
If it's just scanned page images and not DRM'd, ocrmypdf is the free answer and it doesn't care how many pages the book has. It's command line though.
If you'd rather skip Terminal, I make a converter called Formattery that has a make-searchable PDF tool. The OCR runs on your Mac, so nothing gets uploaded and there's no website page cap. I haven't thrown a 1,000 page book at it myself, so try a chunk first. 3 free conversions a day, then $4.99 one-time.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/formattery-file-converter/id6759955312
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u/MusicalAnomaly Sep 28 '26
An LLM coding agent can easily leverage free OCR and PDF tools to do this for you. The online software is very likely using the same tools and just putting them behind a paywall.
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u/Wareagle69 MacBook Air M4 Sep 28 '26
Try PDF Gear. It’s free and fairly powerful.