> Why not someone implement just a simple snap tool that can detect the text and copy it to the clipboard?
I'm pretty sure OCRFeeder exists. It does exactly that. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/OCRFeeder
I use Tesseract with a gui front-end called OCRFeeder (Linux). Yeah, people say Tesseract is old as the hills, but it does a fantastic job. And OCRFeeder lets you select columns and avoid advertisements, which is a great leg-up for old magazines. It's also very good at giving you proper paragraphs, handling split end-of-line words, and so on. It will import a pdf, but it's picky about which ones (not surprising, given the vast possibilities in a pdf).
If you want to try OCRFeeder, I strongly suggest building from source; I found the repository version (Ubuntu) old and buggy.
If you just need to add text to a pdf, OCRMyPDF works very well, but of course you'll end up with scannos and such.
I also found this. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/OCRFeeder
>OCRFeeder is a document layout analysis and optical character recognition system.
didn't try it yet. dunno if you can compile to macOS.