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Having been through the scanning of a large number of personal documents, I found good success in doing very good OCR on printed documents. Further, the software that the scanner comes with can also OCR pdf documents quite nicely.

This also includes mis-registered stuff.

I am about to start playing with tesseract ORC to see how it compares. It is claimed to be very good.

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I have actually had good success with the IRIS software bundled in with an HP Scanner,

But:

a) It is Windows b) It is a good (in the best sense) example of what is still cripple ware c) It is not available to people that don't purchase a scanner, even though PDFs and legal documents often come via email d) It is slow e) It makes every recipient of that document have to OCR it, as opposed to just teaching/demanding the lawyers and courts to distribute them in their original Word/GoogleDoc/WordPerfect/TextPDF form.

I am using the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner which also has all the parts needed to run very nicely on Mac.

I agree that there is a bit of expense; the time is quite reasonable.

Insofar as

>eaching/demanding the lawyers and courts

good luck with that.

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