Convert scanned PDFs to Markdown with on-device OCR

A scanned PDF is just photographs of pages — invisible to search, to screen readers, and to AI tools. Milldown detects scans automatically and recognizes the text with Apple's Vision framework, entirely on your Mac. No cloud OCR service ever sees your documents.

How it works

1. Drop the scanned PDF into Milldown like any other file.No settings needed — if a PDF has little or no embedded text, OCR kicks in automatically.
2. Apple's Vision framework reads every page on-device.The same technology behind Live Text in Photos — fast and accurate, including numbers and tables.
3. You get ordered, structured text with per-page markers.An "On-device OCR" badge shows the result came from recognition, not extraction.

Why on-device OCR matters

• Privacy — scanned documents are usually the sensitive ones: contracts, invoices, medical records, IDs. Cloud OCR means uploading them to someone's server. Milldown never does.
• Accessibility — recognized text is navigable by VoiceOver and any screen reader; the original scan wasn't.
• Searchability — text in Markdown is findable in Spotlight, Obsidian, grep, anything.
• Works offline — recognition needs no connection at all.

Practical notes

Quality follows the scan: clean 300-dpi scans recognize nearly perfectly; phone photos of crumpled pages do worse. Handwriting recognition is limited — this is built for printed text. Mixed PDFs (some text pages, some scanned) convert the embedded text directly and are OCR'd only when the whole document looks scanned.