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Which is the best OCR and scanner freeware?

alun4
alun4 Posts: 491 Forumite
Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Combo Breaker
Does anyone know of any good Scanner software and Optical Charachter Recognition software. I have Msoft Office but the pictures scan with a distinct grain and if I scan a written page with columns and different type styles/sizes and ask it to convert to OCR we get a ..... mess!

Hope you can help.

Comments

  • espresso
    espresso Posts: 16,448 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    Not sure about the best but it's free. see here.
    :doh: Blue text on this forum usually signifies hyperlinks, so click on them!..:wall:
  • nullogik
    nullogik Posts: 467 Forumite
    Don't know any free ones, but Readiris Pro & ABBYY FineReader are very good and worth a look at.
    Lack of money is the root of all evil.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
  • There's not a lot of choice in this field (freeware-wise). The best ones are JOCR (it does require Microsoft Office 2003 or higher version though) and the above mentioned SimpleOCR.
    The true cost of something is what you give up to get it.
  • buglawton
    buglawton Posts: 9,246 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Just ran a little test, used SimpleOCR to convert a plain text document then used MS Office Tools > Document Imaging to do the same. The MS result was nearly 100% accurate while sadly SimpleOCR made mainly a mess. Maybe SimpleOCR can be tweaked or trained. Meanwhile I suspect that the best way to use MS Document imaging is to make images of each block of text of a certain font type then convert each one separately.
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