PDFpen Scan+ with OCR, PDF text export App Reviews

Needed to scan a few book excerpts to incorporate in article I am writing and thought this app might be what I need. Installed on my iPad Mini but when I tried to scan book pages the app kept telling me the pages were not visualizing or something. Plus was unable to copy as text the one and only selection I did manage to sort of scan. Discovered that the only way to convert the file to plain text or Word Doc would have been to use online Adobe conversion tool and pay them 23 bucks a year for a subscription. And who knows if that would have worked. Surprised that David Sparks, someone I very much respect, has been shilling for this developer by narrating a video on their web site. This app in my opinion is totally worthless and the app description is bogus. Dont waste your money.

Cannot grant app camera access. When I press the camera icon, app prompts me to grant access in the iPhones general settings. In "privacy" / "camera", app never shows up. New installation on iPhone 6 plus iOS 8.3. Please fix..

Once again Smile has applied their skills to an app that simplifies my day. Its difficult to put into words how much I appreciate this teams hard work.

If I didnt have scanner pro by readdle I might be more impressed as a scanning app. The OCR feature is pretty good as long as your document is fairly clear. Needs- multi page export to Dropbox - use of folders (dont know why its not available) - and more

Looks wonderful, but it keeps crashing: when cropping, when changing color depth, when performing OCR, when saving. I hope this can be fixed in an update. I really want this to work.

I think this software has lots of potential, but on my iPhone 4S the app crashes every time I try to take a picture, and quite often when I try to OCR. This is a bit surprising given Smiles name brand. I look forward to their fixes.

I’m running this app on an iPhone 4s/iOS 7, and it’s unusable. On my first use of the app, it crashed OCRing the first page. Then it crashed cropping the second page.

OCR in Spanish Does Not work, when finding the edges of an image lose information on the text. Rotating the image should be before cropping.

Hard to believe that a company like SmileOnMyMac would produce an app that is not accessible with VoiceOver

Despite bad reviews, I paid the premium price only because its from Smile and has iCloud support. The auto straighten feature makes the image worse but its pretty good if you do it manually. The dates are all showing up as 1969. There are mysterious untitled documents showing up. Something to do with iCloud sync Im sure. They eventually go away. The OCR is terrible. Text which looks quite clear doesnt get translated or is translated completely wrong. Might as well just open them with PDF Pen on my Mac and let that do the OCR.

If you need to OCR docs this is not the app for that

quite easy to use, but unfortunately it keeps crashing when creating pdf documents with multiple pages. OCR and exporting documents are quite slow.

It would be great if this app did what it claims, but its OCR function — the primary reason I bought it — is wretched. Its back to Acrobat Pro or ABBYY Fine Reader for me.

Its useless, crash all the time

Edge detection for unusually sized documents (e.g. scanning pages of a book) needs to be a bit streamlined/faster. It’s very tedious to deal with 20+ non-standard pages. Also it would be nice if you could preset the color (e.g. black/white) so you don’t have to do it each time on each page. After further use and comparison I have concluded that this app has much to learn from ScanBot. The OCR capabilities are great here but ScanBot excels at scanning documents quickly and with better edge detect and snapping. The whole process is much more streamlined.

This app is one of the best for scanning. I use it all of the time for receipts. However, with the last update, every time I scan something new and I go to find the edges, the entire screen is black. I have restarted my phone and tried everything but the same situation, all black. Now this app is unusable. Please fix. Thank you.

Works great on my iPhone 6 plus I like that I can scan things and organize them in folders. It does OCR too so i can export the test to edit it or send it to email. Feature request: I would like to see a bounding box around the paper that I am scanning when I hold the phone over the paper before I take the photo. There are other app that will recognize the edges so I dont have to crop manually. Its easy enough to crop in the app but I would love to see that as a feature in a future release.

Ive used t. Expander and pdfpen for years, with love, thus expected better from the companys ocr app. The ocr performance is horrible, even under near-optimum conditions (compared to competing apps; prizmo or Abby). and even if you let go of OCR, the app is way too clunky to use as a scanner/uploader app. Most things you can do with a swipe& tap, in apps like scanbot or Readdle Scanner pro, take several taps and some waiting time with this one. Wont be using the app unless a fundamental update arrives in the future.

Ive used Smile software for a long time on my Mac. PDFpen Scan+ is another fine tool from them. I reported an issue with this software and a bug with iPhone 6+ and they got back immediately and just days later, I see this update on the app store which fixes the issue I had. Nice work.

havent tried multiple docs but it looks like $7 wasted, crashes running ocr on a small page of text. ill try some more docs to see if it gets better and if so ill update the review but im less than pleased based on the first try of the app.