My 14 y.o. would rather work by computer than hand, and that’s understandable. They have spent most of their life typing and little of it writing, and the year and a third of distance learning involved about zero handwriting. They are a sophisticated technology user, but were getting stymied by some of the limitations they find in moving from paper given to them by teachers into something they could respond to by typing. (The teachers will actually prefer this, because it’ll be more extensive and legible than if handwritten.)

They discovered Acrobat Scan, but wanted to take the OCR results and paste into Word, which produced formatting problems and imperfect results. Also, Adobe’s OCR capabilities are frankly quite terrible and out of date. Head to head against PDFPen, Evernote (OCR for search only, not export), and Apple’s Live Text in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and the upcoming macOS 12 Monterey—pitiful. I wrote up a brief comparison in this Macworld article.

My younger also wants to be able to take a reading on paper, scan it, and produce a PDF they can search, extract the text on, and mark up with notes. Reading a PDF can be awkward, which is why they want to be able to copy the text elsewhere.

So we tried to sort out a new workflow. They are using Evernote for random storage and it’s working great for them. Evernote lacks text export, though you can import a PDF and when it’s exported, the OCR’d text is included as a layer. It’s not ideal.

Here’s what we worked out last night:

• Scan with a phone using Acrobat Scan, but don’t use its OCR.
• Export from Acrobat Scan to cloud storage.
• On a Mac, open in PDFPen and use its excellent OCR.
• Save text-recognized file from PDFPen and open in Acrobat DC, which has great markup tools.

That is a lot of steps, but they get exactly what they want:

• For general work where they can fill out responses, they can copy and paste the recognized text and then write in their answers.
• For work that requires preserving formatting, they will have a PDF they can markup
• For readings where they want to be able to highlight and markup, search text, or export, they will have a PDF that offers all that.

We’ll be working on refining this.

I would love a workflow of scan -> PDF -> OCR -> markup/comment that’s all in one ecosystem. (The Smile software company used to make Scan+, one of my favorite iPhone scanning apps, but they discontinued that in 2019—and sold PDFPen to another firm, Nitro, in this year.)