How to OCR a Persian (Farsi) PDF on a Mac

A scanned PDF is a stack of pictures. You can read it, but your Mac can’t: you can’t search it, select a sentence, or copy a paragraph into an email. OCR (optical character recognition) fixes that by reading the letters on each page and placing an invisible layer of real text under the picture. The page looks exactly the same, and now it behaves like a normal document.

For Persian this is harder than it should be.

• Adobe Acrobat has no Persian in its list of OCR languages (checked October 2026). The same goes for Arabic and Hebrew.
• Live Text, the text recognition built into macOS, does not list Persian either.
• Online converters can do it, but only by uploading your document to their server. For a contract, a deed or a family letter, that is a real cost.

This guide uses Washi, our PDF editor, which reads Persian, Arabic and Hebrew on the device itself. Nothing is uploaded. If you’d rather use a free command-line tool, there’s a section on that at the end.

On a Mac, step by step

1. Open the scanned PDF in Washi.
2. Choose the languages to read. Go to PDF › OCR Languages… and tick Persian. If the pages also have English on them, tick English too. Washi starts with the languages your Mac is set to, so on an English Mac, Persian has to be added once. Fewer languages give faster and more accurate results, so leave the others off.
3. Run the recognition. Choose PDF › Recognize Text (OCR), or press ⌥⌘O. A progress bar shows how far it has got, and you can cancel at any time.
4. Save with ⌘S. The text layer is now part of the file, so it works in Preview, Finder search, Spotlight and any other PDF reader.

Check that it worked

Press ⌘F and search for a word you can see on the page. Washi’s search understands how Persian is really typed:

• Persian ی and Arabic ي, Persian ک and Arabic ك match each other, so a document typed on an Arabic keyboard is still found by a Persian one.
• A space instead of a half-space (نیم‌فاصله) still matches, because most keyboards have no half-space key.
• Persian digits (۱۲۳) match Latin ones (123).

You can also select a line on the page and copy it. If the copied text reads correctly, the OCR worked.

A whole folder of scans

Choose PDF › Make a Folder Searchable… and pick the folder. Washi works through every PDF in it. Your originals are never written over. If one file can’t be read, the rest still get done. Digitally signed files are left alone (see below).

On iPhone or iPad

Open the document, tap the ••• menu in the toolbar, and choose OCR Languages… to tick Persian. Then choose Recognize Text… from the same menu. Washi on iPhone and iPad can also scan paper with the camera and read it in the same way. One purchase covers the Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Tips for cleaner results

• Scan straight and clear. A page photographed at an angle, in shadow or out of focus loses letters. A flatbed scan or a scanner app gives the best results.
• Printed text works best. Typed and printed Persian reads well. Handwriting generally does not, in any OCR tool.
• Only the languages on the page. Every extra language is one more thing the reader has to rule out.

Two things Washi deliberately won’t change

• Digitally signed PDFs. Adding a text layer changes the file, and that would break the signature. Washi tells you and leaves the document as it is.
• Pages with notes or form fields. These are skipped so nothing on them is lost, and Washi tells you how many were skipped.

Need the text in Word?

After the OCR, File › Export as Word… saves the text as a .docx with right-to-left paragraphs that start against the right margin, the way Persian should. If a PDF already has a poor text layer from another converter (letters in the wrong order, words broken apart), Washi can read the pages again with its own OCR instead of copying the broken text.

The free alternative, if you use Terminal

OCRmyPDF is a free, open-source tool that adds a text layer with the Tesseract OCR engine, and Tesseract includes Persian. With Homebrew installed:

brew install ocrmypdf tesseract-lang
ocrmypdf -l fas+eng scan.pdf scan-searchable.pdf

fas is Persian; drop +eng if there’s no English on the pages. It works well, runs on your own Mac, and is the right choice if you’re comfortable in Terminal. Washi does the same job from a menu, searches Persian properly afterwards, and works on iPhone and iPad too.