can I OCR PDF files on macOS with no foreign apps?

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The Preview app can export a PDF file to a PDF file with “Embedded Text“. As easy as that.

What will I do with that PDF with embedded Text? I will run “pdftohtml -xml” on it, and I will add lots of comments to the prettified XML. That’s good for bills and contracts and all that.

2026-09-10 : the quality of the generated text pieces is rather bad: Upper vs lower case. Coordinates. Density (deliberate white space between letters). if Apple has a feedback process, I would quite like to give them feedback in order to improve all this.

(remove this paragraph!)

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