I've written before about the benefits of a paperless office, the zen feeling of being able to walk into the room and not somersault over a pile of paper and break your neck. But when you have reams of paper, how do you turn all that printed text into something that a digital program will be able to recognize and index? Yes, that's correct, use an OCR service or application.
Text Extraction with OCR Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools to Convert Images to Text Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools to Convert Images to Text Read More 2006. However, OCR applications in this area continue to expand, so here are 5 others you should check out, if you're looking to extract that text from a scanned document. Top 3 Free OCR Tools To Turn Your Files Back Into Editable Documents Top 3 Free OCR Tools To Turn Your Files Back Into Editable Documents Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software turns paper documents into machine-readable text . Here we show you the best free OCR tools and how they work. Read more.
We start with the software, quite imaginatively titled, “FreeOCR”. It's a Windows-only app, which works on all PCs running XP and above (although if you're using XP, you'll need to install an additional part).
FreeOCR works for TWAIN scanners, PDF files and TIFF images, and outputs the text to a Microsoft Word file. To use this application, you will also need to download the open source Tesseract OCR engine from Google.
This is the one I liked the most as it accurately transcribed what I had given it. The company behind the app promises 99.8% accuracy, and the app also preserves the original formatting. As the title indicates, the text and formatting are transferred to an editable Word document, but text (.txt) files are also possible.
Recognizes all major image formats as well as Photoshop files. It's a shame that all these great apps are only for Windows. Where's the love for Mac and Linux owners?
This brings us back to Google's Tesseract OCR engine, which acts as the engine room for this fairly well-designed graphical interface. The reader was helpful because it automatically detects the page layout. Or if it has a slight effect, you can manually resize the areas.
The text is placed to the right of the scanned image/document, so you can see if everything is being removed as it should. It performs basic editing of that text, as well as spell checking. Top 5 OCR Spell Check Tools Top 5 OCR Spell Check Tools Read More (if you downloaded the corresponding dictionary).
This OCR tool does double duty. First of all, it is a screenshot tool which then takes the screenshot and converts it to the Windows clipboard. You can then copy and paste the text anywhere you like.
Second, it has speech recognition technology that transcribes your words for you. The site says this is experimental, so don't expect perfect results at this point. Those with sultry accents like mine may experience difficulties.
And you thought we'd be done without a little love from Mac, right? Well fear not, OSX bears! If you need to do OCR, VueScan is here to the rescue. It ties into your scanner, and one of the pros (the site lists it as a scam) is that it's a very lightweight basic program. No bloat, but not too many features either. But it's easy to install, easy to use, and does its job, which is the main thing.
So, which OCR programs float your boat? Are you a Google Drive OCR user perhaps? Or a user of another that we haven't covered here? Let us know in the comments below.
