Converting PDF's to Text

I have a huge collection of documents I want to digitize. I just bought an Epson scanner, so I can scan the documents in a variety of formats, including .jpg, .tiff and pdf. Unfortunately, I can't get the OCR software that came with the scanner (ABBYY FineReader Sprint) to work.
Then I remembered seeing PDF converters online, so I figured I could just scan everyrthing as a PDF, then convert it to text. But I'm confused. I tried Adobe Acrobat's export function, but that didn't do anything. I read that you can open a PDF in Preview and copy the text, but that doesn't work.
It sounds like there are two ways to create a PDF. With OCR software you can create a text-PDF, whereas I apparently have a scanned-image-PDF, if I understand correctly.
Anyway, I'm confused. Can anyone recommend a software program or online service that will convert PDF's to text on a Mac? I'm also interested in learning how to batch process PDF's. I'm going to have hundreds of documents, maybe a few thousand.
Thanks for any tips.

David Blomstrom wrote:
...Can anyone recommend a software program or online service that will convert PDF's to text on a Mac? I'm also interested in learning how to batch process PDF's. I'm going to have hundreds of documents, maybe a few thousand.
Thanks for any tips.
Since being able to scan combined with OCR will be the easiest approach, getting the OCR software to work would seem to be the best solution. Which version of FineReader Sprint do you have? There's a version in the App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/app/abbyy-finereader-express/id412310371?mt=12) which is supposed to be compatible with Lion and Mountain Lion and if that's not the version you have, perhaps you can upgrade to it. Check out http://www.abbyy.com/checkforupdates/?PartNumber=71817&product=FineReader%20Expr ess%20Edition%20for%20Mac which might do the trick.
Unless the scanning process has the OCR step built in, what you'll get is an image, usually JPG, which can be turned into a PDF file but it's still just a picture. If you could turn it into a PDF that has actual text in it, then you can get into text extraction. There are a number of programs which are supposed to be able to do that. The only one I've tried that works pretty well is MS Word in the Office 2013 suite for Windows. I have it running in a Windows 8 Virtual Machine on the Mac, but that's a long and expensive way around to begin to do what you need.

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Converting PDF's to Text

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