5 Ways to OCR Documents on Your Mac. By Jordan Merrick 2 May 2013. Difficulty: Beginner. Share Your Mac's Printer and Scanner. The text is completely searchable and doesn’t replace the text of the scan, instead it uses a clever feature of PDFs called text overlay. Your document may look the same as it did before, but that’s a good. Edit Article How to Edit Text After Scanning. In this Article: Extracting Your Scanned Text Using Other Extractors Community Q&A Optical character recognition (OCR) is a term for software that can recognize text characters in an image, and OCR software typically allows you to extract text from an image, which is the first step to editing it.
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Use this WorldPenScan X to copy text documents to digital via OCR, or use it to translate foreign languages. Use on your Smartphone, MAC or PC. What is the best way for my wife to scan in recipes into pages. She needs to be able to edit the text after scanning in. Mac OS X Speciality level out of ten: 0. If it is a scan, there is no text, just an image of the text. Are you suggesting just pasting bitmaps of the text? Peter More Less. When a scan is complete, Finereader Pro For Mac will highlight the text it has detected but displays the document in it’s original form. One of the most convenient features of ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac is the ability to scan photos that you’ve taken on your phone.
Converting a scanned document to editable text is a handy trick that can save you hours of retyping documents. Free OCR converts your documents for free.
To use Free OCR you need to have your document in a PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF or BMP format. You can upload documents up to 2MB in size which for most small document conversions will be sufficient. We tested the site with the same passage from the introduction of In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Submissions were made in both PDF format and a JPG screenshot of the PDF page we used. Free OCR seems to like PDF files better, the PDF file rendered with fewer errors.
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The rate of errors and quirks in the conversion wasn't much higher than commercial OCR software and just like using a commercial solution you'll need to go through and double check to make sure what you see and what the machine sees are the same thing. If you know of other free OCR services, share the wealth in the comments below.
Free OCR [via One Tip a Day]
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I have written before about the benefits of a paperless office, the zen feeling of being able to walk into the room and not somersault headfirst over a stack of paper and break your neck. But when you have reams of paper, how do you get all of that printed text converted into something that a digital program will be able to recognize and index? Yes, that’s right, you use an OCR service or app.
Text extraction with OCR7 Best Free OCR Software Apps to Convert Images Into Text7 Best Free OCR Software Apps to Convert Images Into TextWant OCR software for free? This article collects the seven best programs that turn images into text.Read More is a subject which we have covered endlessly, since MUO’s birth back in 2006. But the OCR apps in this area keep expanding, so here are 5 others you should look at, if you are looking to extract that text from a scanned documentThe 3 Best Free OCR Tools to Convert Your Files Back Into Editable DocumentsThe 3 Best Free OCR Tools to Convert Your Files Back Into Editable DocumentsOptical Character Recognition (OCR) software turns printed documents into machine-readable text. Here we show you the best free OCR tools and how they work.Read More.
1. FreeOCR
We start with software, entitled rather imaginatively, “FreeOCR”. It’s a Windows-only app, which works on all PC’s running XP and upwards (although if you are using XP, you will need to install an extra part).
FreeOCR works for TWAIN scanners, PDF files, and TIFF images, and outputs the text into a Microsoft Word file. To use this app, you will also need to download the Google Open Source Tesseract OCR engine.
2. FreeOCR to Word
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 retains the original formatting. As the title implies, the text and formatting are transferred into an editable Word document, but text (.txt) files are also possible.
It recognizes all of the main image formats, as well as Photoshop files. It’s just a shame though that all of these great apps are Windows-only. Where’s the love for Mac and Linux owners?
3. gImageReader
This one takes us back again to Google’s Tesseract OCR engine, which acts as the engine room to this rather well designed graphical frontend. The reader was handy because it automatically detects the page layout. Or if it makes a slight boob of it, you can manually readjust the areas. Excel for mac 16.11 cell style no text disappears.
The text is placed to the right of the image / scanned document, so you can see if everything is being taken down as it should. It does basic editing of that text, as well as spell checkingThe Top 5 OCR Spell Checking ToolsThe Top 5 OCR Spell Checking ToolsRead More (if you downloaded the relevant dictionary).
4. Capture2Text
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This OCR tool serves a double role. First of all, it is a screenshot tool which then takes the screenshot and converts it into the Windows clipboard. You can then copy and paste the text into anywhere you want.
Secondly, it has voice recognition technology which transcribes your words for you. The site says this is experimental so don’t expect perfect results at the moment. Those with dreamy sultry accents like mine may experience difficulties.
5. VueScan
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![Best printer scanner for mac Best printer scanner for mac](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126297464/300198797.jpg)
And you thought we would end without some Mac love, didn’t you? Well fear not, OSX’ers! If you need to do any OCR then here is VueScan to the rescue. It links to your scanner, and one of the advantages (the site actually lists it as a con) is that it is a very lightweight basic program. No bloat, but not too many features either. But it’s easy to install, easy to use, and it does its job, which is the main thing.
![Text scanner for pc Text scanner for pc](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126297464/348263518.jpg)
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So which OCR programs float your boat? Are you a Google Drive OCR user perhaps? Or a user of another we haven’t covered here ? Let us know in the comments below.
Image Credit: Paperless sign (Shutterstock)
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Explore more about: File Conversion, OCR.
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I just downloaded the Capture2Text utility (v4.5.1) from Sourceforge. It was simple to use, but the description in this article says that it does Voice recognition. That is not true. It does Text to speech (if enabled).
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Looking for OCR that retains (saves, keeps) the images - that is in-text pictures, images or illustrations in place after the OCR is over. Does nobody care about that?? Searched over dozens of OCR reviews, not even a single one mentions a bit on how the software deals with internal graphic. On the entire internet there seems to be not even a single sreenshot of OCR software processing graphical element - only the text. Simple text for mac. Is graphics in books so unimportant to anybody? Frustrating. wrrr
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Yunmai Technology is also a professional developer of (Optical Character Recognition) OCR software. It has been one of the best mobile OCR technology and application developers in the industry. Yunmai Document Recognition developed by Yunmai Technology is really nice. And it is free.
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'a9t9 free ocr' is an *open-source* program that does exactly what FreeOCR does, but without the spyware and actually better ocr results: http://blog.a9t9.com/p/free-ocr-software.htmlThere is no shortage of options for text editors geared towards developers on the Mac, but TextMate is our top pick. It wins out thanks to its massive programming language syntax support, helpful. What text editor for a java programmer? [closed] Ask Question. Notepad++ is the best free text editor that I have found. Personally, I rarely use it for Java work though: no text editor comes close to an IDE like Eclipse for Java programming work. – Robert Mark Bram Jan 29 '13 at 23:06. Add a comment|. The humble text editor is great for managing code, writing down quick notes, or just as a distraction-free writing tool. This week, we’re looking at five of the best, based on your nominations. Best text editor for mac java. Without any doubt, if you are looking for a free text editor, TextMate is the best text editor for Mac. You may find many free text editors for Windows but there are very few free applications which are available for Mac and TextMate is one of them. What is the best text editor for Java? Update Cancel. Ad by Jira Software, Atlassian. Jira official site. One tool to track issues & release great software. Try Jira for free. What is the best text editor for Mac? What is the best text editor for Android? What is the best time saving text editor for C++?
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Have tried three times to subscribe.. but so far nothing in my inbox to confirm??
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FreeOCR could not be downloaded, because AVAST antivir deletes it.FreeOCR to Word is infected with 6(!) drive by installations and one behaviour scanner..Thanks a lot!
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Abbyy Screenshot Reader has done a great job for me for 100s of OCR (often google books) for years. Sometimes inexpensive, sometimes it has been available free.
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Mark,
As a bichon frisé owner myself ( if you still remember Kicsi) I thank you for mentioning VueScan, the program I've been using for a while for scanning documents, as a text extraction tool from scanned images. Not that I will use it often, but it's good to know it exists in case I'll need it. -
The FreeOCR to Word link sets off my virus scanner which is completely blocking the page. It doesn't like the favicon.ico for the page.
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FreeOCR was pretty good when I tried it a few years ago. It had a very easy to use interface, which was especially helpful when trying to convert those image PDFs that aren't text.The best OCR that was free, however (free in a manner of speaking) was that connected with OneNote. It will not only take screenshots, but also let you save them as a PNG, and also convert any text in an image into, well, text. I found of all the screenshot utilitites and free OCR, that OneNote was the best at taking the original screenshot, and then converting text inside that actual editable text. If you have MS Office, of course, it is 'free.'Its the only program that automatically starts with Windows on my laptop, apart from antivirus and Malwarebytes.
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Awesome, Thanks for sharing.