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OCR Freeware?

macman
macman Posts: 53,129 Forumite
Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
in Techie Stuff
Please can anyone suggest a good OCR program that will run on Windows 7? To be used primarily for scanning documents and importing into Word.
I'm looking for an installable option, rather than one of the online ones like FreeOCR.
Thanks.
No free lunch, and no free laptop ;)

Comments

  • bluesnake
    bluesnake Posts: 1,460 Forumite
    http://www.irfanview.com/ with the free ocr plugin which id downloaded separate will only read the screen, jpegs on the screen and convert it to text. It is no where near Omnipage quality! Sometimes it works well, but others :(

    It is often the usual culprits 1,i,l and o,0,Q and 5,s, does not like the spacing of courier fonts that much.

    better than my typing
  • epninety
    epninety Posts: 563 Forumite
    FreeOCR (as opposed to Free OCR, Free-OCR etc.,etc.) is not online, it's a downloadable Windows program.

    I've only needed it once, but it was excellent when I tried it a few months back.

    http://www.paperfile.net/
  • WhiteChristmas
    WhiteChristmas Posts: 650 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture Combo Breaker
    Tried just about every free option last year - I got best results from http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

    None of them seem to deal very well with serif-ed fonts.
    I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
    But, if the white runs out, I'll drink the red.
  • epninety
    epninety Posts: 563 Forumite
    Note that FreeOCR is built on the tesseract-ocr engine :)
  • macman
    macman Posts: 53,129 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Free-OCR works a treat, thanks all.
    The only glitch I found is that the 'Import to Word' button doesn't work (but, strangely, the 'Import as RTF' button does). Hardly a major issue.
    No free lunch, and no free laptop ;)
  • annen
    annen Posts: 2 Newbie
    I want to convert a tiff. document to Word. Tried downloading the tesseract software but its not simple enough for me to work out how to actually run the thing! Any ideas for free software I can download to run on Windows 8.1 that a) Is as intuative as possible to use & b) won't install lots of malware on may laptop!
    Thanks in advance
    Anne
  • Jivesinger
    Jivesinger Posts: 1,221 Forumite
    Ninth Anniversary Combo Breaker
    Office 2003 (and, it seems 2007) actually had an OCR utility built-in.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_Document_Imaging

    Not sure how good it was compared to more recent software though.
  • epninety
    epninety Posts: 563 Forumite
    annen wrote: »
    Any ideas for free software I can download to run on Windows 8.1

    Even the best OCR won't help you if you can't read. :pPosts 2 and 3 both have suggestions you skipped over.
This discussion has been closed.
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