FoxTrot Search Tips

Performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on scanned PDF files

OCR requires macOS 13 Ventura or later, and FoxTrot Professional 8 or later.

Recognizing text in scanned PDF files is too slow and too CPU-intensive to be performed systematically during indexing.

However, you can manually identify the PDF files on which you want to perform OCR (typically, scanned documents), and convert them to OCR’ed PDF files, so that their content will be indexed.

Here is an example of how you can do this:

• perform the following search:

  • [all items of type] [PDF]
  • [then filter by Spotlight attribute] [text content length] [is less than] [default unit] [100]
  • [then filter by Spotlight attribute] [logical size] [is greater than] [kB] [50]

• from the toolbar or from the View menu, toggle the result list to thumbnails

• select all the files that look like scanned documents (use shift-click, command-click, or select all)

• from the contextual menu, or from the Action toolbar menu, select "PDF Optical Character Recognition…"

Performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on image files

OCR requires macOS 13 Ventura or later, and FoxTrot Professional 8 or later.

Recognizing text in image files is too slow and too CPU-intensive to be performed systematically during indexing.

However, you can manually identify the image files on which you want to perform OCR (typically, photos of documents, or screenshots), and convert them to OCR’ed PDF files, so that their content will be indexed.

Here is an example of how you can do this:

• perform the following search:

  • [all items of type] [images]

• from the toolbar or from the View menu, toggle the result list to thumbnails

• select all the images that contain text you want to index (use shift-click, command-click, or select all)

• from the contextual menu, or from the Action toolbar menu, select "Convert images to OCR’ed PDF…"

Focusing on a Project

You may want to create multiple separate indices in FoxTrot Pro’s manage indices window, one for each “project” you work on. This way, you can easily search the relevant files and folders only, when you are focused on a specific project.

You can also schedule a frequent index update for the indices of your active projects, and a less frequent update for older projects, or for your global index.