If you need OCR on the Mac, the reigning heavyweights are Abbyy and Canon-owned I.R.I.S., whose respective FineReader and Readiris products continue to offer affordable alternatives to OmniPage, which abandoned the platform nearly 15 years ago. In recent years, OCR has found its way into numerous cloud services and mobile apps, allowing consumers to take advantage of the technology without the need for standalone software. Optical character recognition (OCR) software provides a way to quickly convert printed or scanned documents into editable text or searchable PDF files.