This Automator app will strip the colors from a scanned PDF and then OCR it with PDFPen. The converison to black and white will remove some unwanted artifacts from the scanning such as dust and wrinkles while greatly reduce file size.
Note! This script will replace the original file. Use it with duplicates until you are confident with how it works.
- A recent version of Mac OS X.
- PDFpen or PDFpenPro by Smile Software. PDFPen uses the OmniPage OCR engine which is pretty good, often much better than the free software that came with your scanner.
Launch Automator, choose to create an Application.
The application consists of two actions:
- Apply Quartz Filter to PDF Documents
- Run AppleScript
Add these actions right away.
Use the Black & White filter.
If you use PDFpenPro, you need to edit the tell application-command below.
Cut and paste this code snippet into the action's code area:
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "PDFpen"
open input
set theDoc to document 1
tell theDoc
if needs ocr of theDoc then
ocr theDoc
repeat while performing ocr of theDoc
delay 1
end repeat
delay 1
close with saving
end if
end tell
end tell
return input
end run
Save your new application and drop your PDF:s on its icon.