What ZenOCR is
ZenOCR turns screenshots, PDFs and bad handwriting into clean text and Markdown. The AI models run on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no cloud service behind it.
Download the press kit
One zip, 47 MB: the app icon, twelve screenshots at 2x on a neutral background, three of them the page and the result side by side, the fact sheet and this page’s copy as plain text, and the three demo clips. Use any of it without asking. The clips on their own, no audio and no watermark: screenshot capture in AI mode, in Fast mode, drag and drop.
The facts
- Name
- ZenOCR (App Store listing: “ZenOCR - Local AI OCR”)
- What it is
- Offline OCR app for macOS. Screenshot capture and file drop, text and Markdown out.
- Platform
- macOS 14.0 or later. Apple Silicon only.
- Price
- Free to download. $12.99 once to unlock Pro. No subscription.
- Download size
- 11.6 MB
- Engines
- Apple Vision (Fast mode). On-device GLM-OCR and DeepSeek-OCR (AI mode).
- Output
- Plain text, Markdown, tables, LaTeX for equations
- Developer
- Taoo425, working solo
- Category
- Productivity, rated 4+
- Links
- zenocr.com · Mac App Store · hello@zenocr.com
Copy you can paste
Pick a length. Written to be used as it is, no attribution needed.
ZenOCR is a Mac app that reads screenshots, PDFs and handwriting and gives back clean text or Markdown. The AI models run on your own machine, so nothing is uploaded and there is no account. Free to download, $12.99 once to unlock Pro. macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon.
What it does
- Works fully offline. No account, no upload, no API key field.
- Two modes on one shortcut. Apple Vision for instant text, an on-device model for the pages Vision gives up on.
- Handles handwriting, equations, tables and multi-column PDFs. Output is Markdown, with LaTeX for the maths.
- Apple Silicon native, running on the GPU. 11.6 MB to download.
Why I built it
My handwriting is bad and I write a lot of it by hand. Getting those pages into text meant uploading them somewhere, and plenty of what I scan is confidential enough that I did not want to. I also tried pushing documents through ChatGPT. It works, but a few hundred pages burns tokens fast, and paying by the page felt absurd for something the Mac in front of me can do on its own. I went looking for a local tool, could not find one I wanted to use, and built this.
How features get chosen
ZenOCR launched on r/macapps in May 2026 as one window: drag a file in, get text out. Most of what has been added since came out of the comments there, including more languages, PDF to Markdown and LaTeX tables. Things I wanted myself, like watch folders, have waited. Both threads are public, criticism included: launch, screenshot capture.
“As a student I threw a whole batch of math equations and tables at it, and honestly I was surprised how well it handles them.”
u/Stubborninmate · r/macapps
What it does not do yet
- Diagrams and figures are not parsed. Text and tables only.
- Arabic, Hindi and Thai are not where I want them yet.
- AI mode wants memory. On an 8 GB Mac, Fast mode is the better default.
- There is no iPhone or iPad version. It gets asked for often.
Get in touch
It is just me, so you are emailing the person who wrote the code. Review copies and Pro codes on request, usually answered the same day.