ABBYY FineReader PDF 15.2.14 — Mac version

Table editing that doesn't fall apart

Plenty of apps promise OCR, but FineReader 15's handling of tables inside PDFs and scans is where it earns its keep. You're not just getting a rough text dump in a grid. It reads the structure and lets you tweak cell contents directly without the formatting collapsing. When you export to XLSX, the logic holds — rows, columns and numbers stay put.

Citation copies you can trust

Lifting a paragraph from a locked PDF for translation or a footnote is never a straight copy-paste job. FineReader's text-fragment tool grabs the passage and preserves the reading order across columns. It's a small thing until you're pulling quotes from a two-column academic paper and the middle sentence doesn't jump to the wrong side of the page.

Archive-ready PDF/A export

For documents that need to outlast the software, the PDF/A output gives you a self-contained file that embeds fonts and colour profiles. No missing glyphs when the council's planning portal opens it in ten years. You still get the usual DOCX, RTF and ODT conversions for everyday editing, but PDF/A is the quiet feature you're glad you had when someone asks for a permanent record.

All of this works on an old Intel Mac running macOS 11 — nothing newer required. The built-in viewer respects dark mode, and Continuity Camera means you can snap a paper form on your iPhone and have it land straight into the app as editable text. No fiddling with separate scanner software.

• macOS 11 or later
• Intel processor