Evernote runs text-recognition on all the images uploaded to their service. This great feature allows you to search through photos taken of notes and printouts. How does Evernote do it? It sounds like a fairy land.
I’m using Adobe Acrobat Pro to OCR a batch of 32 PDF files that I scanned on the printer at 300 dpi. It takes a good amount of time for it to process each PDF. 388 pages in 32 PDF files took 37 minutes running on a 2011 Macbook Pro (Intel Core i7 Processor 2GHz with
Also, the 32 pre-OCR PDF files totaled 26.9 MB. The OCR PDF files grew up to 141.6 MB. That’s 5.2x times as large!