Hello Applevis. I am a long time windows user and I've recently taken the plunge and gotten myself a macbook. I have been doing pretty well with most things, but I haven't yet discovered an app that does what I need with pdf documents.
I play a lot of tabletop rpg games which tend to come in pdf rulebooks. The accessibility of these documents is, let's say, shaky at best. Some are tagged correctly, but some require a lot of OCR.
On Windows, I use a combination of Microsoft Edge and Adobe Acrobat to read the documents. Adobe has a setting where it will show a page view for each page and you can OCR the pdf file and go from page to page, as well as interacting with tables of contents and embedded hyperlinks.
One thing the Mac does super well is that Voiceover can describe images on a page. This describes the pictures and charts in the books in a way that Jaws and NVDA don't even come close to. Unfortunately, I really need to be able to see the text and preferably navigate it by elements like tables.
Is there a good PDF handler for Mac that will do what I need here? At a minimum, I need to navigate effectively through a document, explore tables, and describe images that accompany the text.
Thanks for any help you might be able to provide.
By Zach, 14 November, 2026
Forum
Mac
Comments
Paperback.
It might not do everything, but it does a lot, including recognizing text in image PDFs, using Mac's OCR.
https://paperback.dev/
Paperback
I just downloaded Paperback and it looks exactly like what I need. Thank you very much for your help. This is a lifesaver. I've been beating my head against the wall trying to use preview for this for a week. Thank you!
It's impossible to select text :(
With voiceover at least, in any of apple native pdf viewers (preview / safari view, which is, well, copy paste preview anyway :) ) or chromium's. Plus chrome since forever don't expose any pdf / autotagged attribute like tables like firefox does, on any platform including chromeos. I've complaining to apple about this since 2023. Good for you if paperback work, I really should try this thing soon my friends are positively spamming me about it.
Re: It's impossible to select text :(
If you've used something like QRead on Windows, it's a lot like that. But you know, it's actually maintained and getting new features, e.g. you can hit enter I think on an image in a PDF file to have OCR run on it. You're supposed to be able to do something option-o to do a range instead of one page at a time, but that's not working for me. Other than that though, it kind of works a lot like TextEdit, e.g. you interact with it to maintain your place when you stop, shift-arrows does text selection, up/down moves by and reads lines, and so on.
I need to buy the iOS version soon, not because I necessarily need it on iOS though I'm sure it will be great, but because that's apparently what supports/helps support development. It's not perfect, sometimes when you open it up on Mac and interact with a document, sometimes your place isn't saved. But I mean, it's pretty great. I'm pretty sure you can add bookmarks and move to them, but it does automatically save your place as well. That's the part that sometimes doesn't work.