FixMyScan vs Adobe Acrobat OCR

The short version

If you work with PDFs all day (contracts, forms, reports), Acrobat Pro does far more than FixMyScan and its OCR is one tool among many. If you have a scanned book and want to read it on a Kindle, Kobo or reMarkable, Acrobat gives you searchable text but leaves the pages as they were: same margins, same grey paper. FixMyScan exists for that second case.

What Acrobat does better

Adobe’s pricing page lists more than 70 tools in Acrobat Pro. The ones FixMyScan has no answer to:

• Editing. Change the text and images inside a PDF, and turn scanned documents into editable PDFs.
• Export. Save a PDF as Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
• Signing and forms. Fill, sign and password-protect PDFs, collect e-signatures, and create web forms.
• Review. Compare two versions of a PDF, share a link and collect comments.
• Redaction. Remove sensitive text for good.
• Desktop and browser. It runs as an app and online.

Its OCR is part of that: Scan & OCR recognises the text and adds a selectable layer. For one short document, Adobe’s free online OCR does the same after you sign in. That page states no size or page cap.

Where a scanned book is different

A scanned book is not a document you want to edit. It is a few hundred pages you want to read, usually on a small screen. That raises problems office OCR is not designed around:

• Margins. A PDF keeps its page shape, so wide margins shrink the text on a 6 or 7 inch screen. You want one crop for every page, not a page-by-page crop.
• Paper colour. Library copies and archive downloads often have grey or yellow paper. On e-ink, that becomes a muddy background with faint letters.
• Tilt. Pages scanned a degree or two off straight make lines drift, and a single crop then clips them.
• Size. Send to Kindle takes PDFs up to 200 MB on its website and 50 MB by email. Colour or grey scans of long books often go over.

Acrobat’s feature list does not mention whole-book cropping for e-readers or black-and-white output for e-ink. Adobe’s community reports deskew through OCR and the Enhance Scanned Document tool, but we have not checked it on the current version.

What FixMyScan does instead

1. Upload the book. A scanned PDF or DjVu file, up to 1,000 pages, from any browser.
2. Set one crop. The pages are layered so you can see where text falls across the whole book. One box, every page.
3. Download. Straightened pages, white paper, black text, pictures kept in greyscale, and hidden text under every word, so search, highlight and dictionary look-up work on your e-reader.

The page order and page numbers stay as they were, which matters if you cite the book. Language is detected for you across 19, including English, German, French, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Fraktur and Ancient Greek.

Black-and-white pages are also much smaller than grey ones. A 300-page book in our production run on 2 November 2026 went from 13.0 MB to 9.0 MB, every page with text. We have not run the same book through Acrobat, so this is not a comparison.

Price and terms

Adobe’s figures are from its US pricing page on 4 November 2026; prices differ by country.

What FixMyScan will not do

It does not edit text, export to Word, fill forms or sign anything. It does not reflow a book into an EPUB. It reads printed text, not handwriting. And it processes one book at a time.

It does keep your file private and deletes it 24 hours after the book is ready, or 24 hours after upload if you never convert it.

Which to choose

Best suited for: Acrobat Pro if you need a PDF editor for documents and OCR is one step among many. FixMyScan if you have scanned books to read on an e-reader and want them cropped, white and searchable without learning a PDF suite.

You can also use both: FixMyScan for the book, Acrobat for the paperwork. To check whether a file needs OCR at all, use the free scanned PDF checker. If the file is too big to send, start with PDF too big for Kindle.

Questions