Monday, July 21, 2014

OCR for occasional and light users.

The most accurate free OCR program I have used is the OnlineOCR found at http://www.onlineocr.net/. Some might find shortcomings such as its inability to use a scanner as a source for text as a reason not to consider using this program, but I can overlook this as the program has other neat features.

First of all, the program runs online and no download is required -- an excellent feature is you are short on memory or fear malware which comes with many of the freeware on offer nowadays.

One needs to scan text and save it as a jpg,  then read the file into the program, which will read it and turn into a MS Word document which you can download and make further editing changes. The good feature of this program is that it reads the formatting of the original and the different fonts accurately, so you have an identical document as the original. The OCR reads with almost 100% accuracy. The free version has limitations such as the number of pages allowed per hour or per day. There is also a limit on the size of the jpg file to be uploaded.

If you want a program that sits in your computer then Free OCR to Word found http://www.ocrtoword.com/ may be just the thing for you.

The source could either be a file or the scanner and you have the option to save the file as a Word document or a text file. The OCR is good and reads with very high accuracy -- though not as well as the OnlineOCR mentioned above. The formatting of the original not captured nor the different fonts. So a little more work editing the text is required.

Both OCRs do not have a batch files facility but they are free so what is there to complain?