Support

Requirements

Getting started

1. Install Legible OCR from the Mac App Store and open it.
2. The window's setup panel offers the model download. Start it; it is 3.93 GB and needs doing once. You can pause and resume it, and choose a smaller pack first in Settings › Models.
3. Open a PDF or an image: File › Open (⌘O), drag it onto the window, or Open With from Finder. The document joins the library in the sidebar.
4. Press Run All (⌘R) to read the document, or select a page and Run Page. Each page's text appears beside the page image as it is read.

The model download

Legible runs Unlimited-OCR, an open vision model that the mlx-community organisation publishes on Hugging Face in four packs. The app downloads the pack you choose from huggingface.co over HTTPS, with no account and no token, checks every file against a known hash, and keeps it inside its own container. Nothing downloaded is executed as code. The privacy policy says what the download reveals, which is only what any download does.

Settings › Models lists the four with a radio for the one in use. Each downloads, verifies and removes on its own, one download at a time. Choosing another downloaded pack while a page is being read restarts that page with the new weights. Choosing one not yet downloaded stops reading until it is.

The download stalls or fails. It retries by itself after a transient failure and resumes where it left off. If it stays stuck, pause it and resume, check that the Mac is online and that huggingface.co is reachable from your network, and make sure there is room on the disk: the app refuses to start a download it cannot fit, and says how much is free.

The free version, the trial and the unlock

Legible OCR is a free download. The free version reads five pages of any document, any five, with re-reads free; pages beyond that are shown locked in the sidebar and a banner says how many. Two in-app purchases lift the cap, both bought through the Mac App Store in Settings › Purchase or from the banner:

• 7-day Trial, free. Reads every page for seven days from the moment you start it. Before it starts, the app states its duration, what stops when it ends, and the price of the full version. It can be started once per Apple Account. When it ends the app returns to the free version; nothing you read is lost.
• Full Version, one purchase, no subscription. Reads every page, for good. The price is shown by the App Store in your local currency.

Both belong to the Apple Account signed in to the App Store on the Mac. On another Mac, or after reinstalling, open Settings › Purchase and press Restore Purchases. Pages that were locked start reading by themselves once a purchase lands.

The buttons are dimmed. The app reads the prices from the App Store before it can offer a purchase; without a connection to the store it cannot. Check that the Mac is online and that you are signed in to the App Store, then reopen Settings › Purchase. A purchase already made is kept by the App Store's own cache, so a Mac that was online when it was bought keeps the unlock offline.

Refunds are handled by Apple, not by us, under Apple's terms: reportaproblem.apple.com.

Reading pages

Each page is shown three ways: the page image with a box around every block the model found, and the text as Rendered (headings, paragraphs, tables, equations and figures laid out as on the page), as Markdown, or as Plain Text. Click a box to jump to its text and back. ⌘+, ⌘− and ⌘0 zoom the rendered form.

A page that comes out blank costs nothing against the free allowance, nor does one that fails or is cancelled. A page that runs long is cut off at the model's limit and marked so; run it again if the text is incomplete. If the file changes on disk while it is in the library, the app notices and offers to read it again.

Reading is in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other Latin-script languages; equations come out as LaTeX and tables as Markdown. The app's own interface is in English.

Exports and figures

File › Export (⌘E) saves the document; Copy Page (⇧⌘C) copies the page shown. The save panel's Format menu offers:

• Markdown (.md) and Plain Text (.txt): the text of every page read.
• Markdown with Figures: a folder, or a ZIP, with the Markdown and each figure as a PNG beside it.
• Searchable PDF: your original PDF or image written out again with an invisible text layer under each page, so Preview, Spotlight and any PDF reader can find, select and copy the text. Saved as name-searchable.pdf by default. A long document takes a few seconds; a progress bar shows it, with Cancel.

Figures are cropped at exactly the box the model marked, from the same rendering of the page the app reads. In the rendered form, drag a figure to Finder, Mail or Notes, or right-click it to copy or save it.

If some pages have not been read when you export, the file holds the pages that have and the app says which are missing.

Find and search

Find (⌘F) looks for a word or phrase in the open document, across every page read, ignoring case and accents. A bar shows the count; ⌘G and ⇧⌘G step through the matches, each highlighted in the text and ringed on the page image. Escape or Done closes it.

Search Library (⌥⌘F) searches every page the app has ever read, across every document, from the field at the top of the sidebar. Results replace the outline, a section per document, the match in bold; click one to open the page. The index updates as pages finish reading.

Agents

Settings › Agents turns on a local server that lets a coding agent read your library through the Model Context Protocol. It is off by default, listens on 127.0.0.1 only (port 7423, changeable), and needs a bearer token that the pane shows, copies and can regenerate. Turning Agents off closes it. The pane shows the one command that connects each agent:

# Claude Code
claude mcp add --transport http legible http://127.0.0.1:7423/mcp
# Codex (the token goes in an environment variable; the pane shows the line)
codex mcp add legible --url http://127.0.0.1:7423/mcp

The tools an agent gets: list_documents, get_document, read_document (the text as Markdown or plain text), list_figures and get_figure, search_documents, and add_document, run_ocr and wait_for_document to add a file and have it read. An agent is held to the same five-page allowance as you until the trial or the unlock lifts it, and its replies say which pages were held.

An agent can only read a document that is in the library; it cannot open a file by path, as the app is sandboxed. add_document gives the agent a command that uploads the file's bytes, and Legible keeps a copy in the library.

The port is taken. The pane says so; choose another. The agent cannot connect. Make sure Agents is on and the token in the agent's configuration is the one the pane shows now (Regenerate changes it).

Menu bar and start at login

By default, closing Legible's window quits the app. Under Settings › Agents › Background, with Agents on, you can ask it to keep serving agents when the window closes: the Dock icon goes away and a menu bar icon takes its place, from which you can open the window again or quit. Start at login starts it that way when you log in; macOS may ask you to approve it under System Settings › General › Login Items. While hidden and idle the model is unloaded to free memory.

When something goes wrong

"The model chosen is not downloaded yet"

Settings › Models has a pack selected that is not on the disk. Download it, or select one that is.

Reading is very slow, or the Mac becomes unresponsive

The model is swapping. Close other large apps, or switch to the 4-bit pack in Settings › Models, which needs about half the memory. On an 8 GB Mac, 4-bit is the pack to use.

A page is cut off

Very dense pages can reach the model's output limit; the page is marked and the text it did produce is kept. Run the page again; if it is cut off at the same point, the page is longer than one read allows, and the plain-text form holds what was read.

"The library could not be opened"

The app falls back to a temporary library for the session and says so; what you read is kept until it quits. Quit and reopen; if it persists, write to us with the message shown.

The quit took a long time

A Searchable PDF export that was in progress may not have been written; the original is untouched. Export again.

Deleting everything

Deleting the app from Applications removes it, its library and the downloaded model together, since all of it lives in the app's container.

Contact

Email [email protected]. Say which Mac, which version of macOS, and which version of the app (Legible OCR › About Legible OCR), and what you saw. For a problem with a particular document, say what kind of page it is; please do not send a document you would not want read by a person.

Legible OCR on the Mac App Store