Vision OCR

Turn scanned PDFs into documents you can actually search.

A scan is a picture of a page. Your Mac can see it, but it can’t read it — you can’t select a sentence, you can’t copy a quote, and ⌘F finds nothing. Vision OCR fixes that. Drop a scan in, and you get back a PDF that looks exactly the same but whose words you can select, copy and search like any other document.

It can also just hand you the plain text, if that’s what you’re after.

⬇︎ Download Vision OCR

Free, open source, and it runs entirely on your Mac — nothing you scan is ever uploaded anywhere. Requires macOS 13 (Ventura) or later, on an Apple Silicon or Intel Mac. No setup beyond dragging it to Applications.

Installing it

Download the disk image from the latest release.
Open it and drag Vision OCR onto the Applications folder shortcut.
The first time you open it, macOS will refuse and say it “could not verify” the app. That’s expected, and getting past it takes about fifteen seconds.…

score = signal / reach signal = 0.25·commit_velocity // commits in last 90 days (cap 30) + 0.20·contributor_work // unique authors × velocity (cap 100) + 0.20·issue_resolution // closed ÷ total issues + 0.20·fork_ratio // forks ÷ stars (proxy for real usage) + 0.10·release_cadence // releases in 90 days (cap 3) + age_bonus // +0 to +0.30 after 6 months + homepage_bonus // +0.05 if homepage is set reach = log₁₀(stars + watchers + 10)█

health = 0.35·recency // days since last commit (90d decay) + 0.25·cadence // commit rhythm consistency + 0.20·issue_health // closed ÷ total issues + 0.20·pr_health // merged ÷ total PRs█

Healthy 80 – 100 active, responsive, regular releases Stable 60 – 79 maintained, steady, no alarms Quiet 40 – 59 slowing down — watch this one At Risk 0 – 39 going dark · candidate for rescue█

solo_builder one person holds > 80% of commits (last 180d) needs_contributors has open "help wanted" or "good first issue" labels hidden_gem < 100 stars · active in last 3 months · documented legacy_hero repo > 5 years old · committed this year fork_magnet forks/stars > 0.5 · used as template or dependency release_machine 5+ releases in the last 90 days under_pressure > 10 open issues · ≤ 2 contributors · health ≥ 60 community_watch watchers > stars · devs tracking before the public community_hub GitHub Discussions enabled · > 20 discussions funded maintainer has active funding channel█