The other day, I wanted to run some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a
document that while it could have been machine-readable, it was a scanned
document.
I first tried to use Adobe Acrobat, but the results were very disappointing.
Since I own a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, I have a license for
Abbyy FineReader PDF.
However, since it is bundled with the ScanSnap device, it is actually
“Abbyy FineReader for ScanSnap”.
Opening the PDF using the Scan To Searchable PDF.app,
I got an error:
This file was not created by ScanSnap. ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap can only process PDF files created by ScanSnap.
Now, I could have printed those 40 pages and scanned them again or trick Abbyy FineReader into believing that this particular document has been scanned with my scanner. I went for the latter:
brew install exiftool
exiftool -Creator="PFU ScanSnap Organizer" myfile.pdf
Voila, shortly after I had my searchable document.