Although businesses are largely transitioning to digital processes and a digital way of working, paper is still prevalent. Use OCR software to convert scan to text and transfer all the paper-based documents into the digital form.
OCR stands for Optical character recognition. Such software as OCR converter uses advanced algorithms to automatically scan and detect hand-written text in documents (mostly PDF, also JPG and PNG) and translate it into digital formats that can be edited as regular text.
DocSight OCR offers online, business hours, and 24/7 live support. DocSight OCR features training via documentation, webinars, live online, and in person sessions. The DocSight OCR software suite is SaaS, and Windows software. DocSight OCR is OCR software. Software pricing starts at $1999.00/one-time. DocSight OCR offers a free trial. Enolsoft PDF Converter with OCR for Mac can help you easily convert native and scanned PDF to Word, Excel, PPT, Keynote, Pages, HTML, EPUB, Text, Rtfd, Images and etc. No matter you want to analyze data, report work to your boss, or have a meeting with your colleague, it can be your great partner. Ocr free download - PDF OCR X Community Edition, Cisdem PDF Converter OCR, FineReader OCR Pro, and many more programs. Ocr reader, free ocr software. Enolsoft PDF to Word with OCR for Mac. Jan 09, 2020 Its features include Windows & Mac OS support. The formats that are supported by this software are Paper, photos, PDFs support, Handy signature features, allows to choose the custom font. The subscription price for this software is $230 yearly. Boxoft Free OCR windows / mac. This OCR Software is software that is very handy and works efficiently. Copyfish Free, PRO and PRO+. In addition to the well-known free OCR options, Copyfish offers the option to use an even better PRO OCR service for OCR. For translation, we integrated Google Translate, the best translation service available. The PRO and PRO+ plans are available as monthly subscription.
Using an OCR software, you can scan paper-based document that may be saved as PDF’s or image files and transform them into editable files like Word or TXT documents. This provides brilliant flexibility, but also reduces your reliance on paper. Some businesses may even use OCR applications to transition to a paperless operation.
In this article, we look at five of the best OCR software available for your benefit.
1. PDF Candy – online OCR tool and OCR software for Windows
PDF Candy is an excellent set of both free online OCR tool and software. The service and the software have multiple features and options to work with PDF files including the “OCR PDF” tool. One can convert PDF to Word, scan documents using advanced OCR software and select the OCR language to get the best results.
PDF Candy Desktop and web version to OCR online both have excellent layout and are easy to use. The program has a main toolbar which shows the main functions, but also a tiled display of the different actions available.
The OCR software of PDF Candy is accurate and provides a smooth scanning process. It is a great tool if you’re in need to OCR PDF quickly and hassle-free.
OS: Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista; web-based
Licensing: Online OCR tool is free; software has Shareware license, $29.95/lifetime
File Size: 141 MB
Our Rating:10 / 10
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2. Abbyy FineReader – multifunctional OCR software
Abbyy FineReader is an excellent tool that features the OCR option and has a simple interface. The layout is user friendly and has a simple main menu where you can select different functions like open PDF, scan to text and compare.
Each process of the OCR software is easy to use and follows a tutorial. Furthermore, there is a help section with guides on how to use the different features including editing PDF, organizing pages, merging and more.
The OCR PDF functionality is advanced and produces excellent results. You can scan directly from a camera or external scanner. Alternatively, you can open pre-existing documents that are already scanned onto your device.
In addition to the basic scanning, you can compare documents, and add annotations too. File formats supported include PDF, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Word. This is a comprehensive program and one of the best OCR software available.
OS: Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7; Mac
Licensing: Trialware, $119 for the personal lifetime license
File Size: 357 MB
Our Rating:9 / 10
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3. Kofax OmniPage Ultimate – convert images and PDF to DOC efficiently
There are two versions of OmiPage OCR software – the standard package and ultimate. The standard package is OK but it does have limited features. If you want a fully functioning OCR application that works with PDF files and images, the Ultimate version is a must-have. It does come at an increased price tag, however.
OmniPage Ultimate is used by some of the biggest companies to turn scan to text and has a great reputation. This is based on its amazing performance fast speeds, and high degree of accuracy. If you are a large corporation requiring thousands of documents scanning, this is a great option to OCR PDF files.
In addition to this, OmniPage Ultimate is packed full of useful features that improve its functionality. You can edit scanned documents and export them to a myriad of different file formats. For large businesses, this is definitely one of the best OCR software available.
OS: Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7
Licensing: Trialware, $499
File Size: 515 MB
Our Rating:8 / 10
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4. Readiris – program that can OCR PDF and features PDF editor
Readiris is another contender for best OCR software. This program is a little expensive, therefore it may not be suitable for small business usage. That being said, it has an excellent OCR process that scans and reads documents in lightning fast times.
The OCR application layout uses several main panels and tabs – it looks modern and works effectively. You can quickly perform different tasks like scanning new documents direct from external devices or opening current documents to be read. You can not only turn your scan to text but also you can convert PDF to DOC and other output formats, add annotations and comments to PDF, sign PDFs and protect them with passwords.
We feel this OCR software is best suited for larger businesses that have a huge volume of documents to be processed. The excellent processing speeds will allow you to complete the scanning quickly and with a high degree of accuracy.
OS: Windows, Mac
Licensing: Trialware, paid version starts at $49
File Size: 425 MB
Our Rating:8 / 10
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5. Rossum – online OCR tool for invoices
Rossum is an interesting web-based application that is primarily used to OCR PDF invoices. It has advanced OCR software that has been tailored specifically to scan and read business invoices.
If you require OCR converter for invoicing and want to digitize your payment systems, this is the best OCR software available for you. The online OCR application looks fantastic and is easy to follow. You can quickly import and scan documents.
Furthermore, it has a myriad of tracking options so you can see which invoices need reviewing or processing.
OS: Web-based
Licensing: Trialware, pricing on demand
Our Rating:7 / 10
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We hope you have found this guide on the best OCR software valuable. OCR is a handy tool for any business. Using such a program allows for the easy scanning and editing of written documents. Sometimes using paper, or hand-written items is unavoidable.
It is therefore ideal to have a OCR PDF tool available, so that you can convert PDF to DOC and edit these documents if necessary. When choosing a suitable OCR program, remember to look at the different licenses available, and if there are any limitations on the number of documents you can scan. Furthermore, be sure to look at the available export options, and the file formats the software supports. If you don’t want to scan to turn scan to text and you need to edit PDF right away then check our review of the best PDF editors.
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OCR or Optical Character Recognition is a sophisticated software technique that allows a computer to extract text from images. In the early days OCR software was pretty rough and unreliable. Now, with the tons of computing power on tap, it’s often the fastest way to convert text in an image into something you can edit with a word processor.
These ten applications offer different takes on the task of OCR, without a price tag and across multiple platforms. If you’ve been looking for a way to turn pictures into words, you’ll almost certainly find the best free ocr software you need below.
FreeOCR (Windows 10)
FreeOCR is a basic free OCR software that offers all the core functionality you’d want from this type of software. For starters, if you have a TWAIN scanner (which is basically all of them) you can directly scan and extract text from paper. Image imports work as you’d expect as well. This includes multi-page documents in TIFF and PDF format as well.
FreeOCR uses an Open Source engine originally developed by Hewlett Packard and eventually released by Google for everyone to use. It’s known as “Tesseract”. Tesseract has some neat features, but one of the most interesting is its automatic layout detection system. This means you don’t need to spend time tediously drawing rectangles around discrete blocks of text.
SimpleOCR (Windows 10)
SimpleOCR is a basic OCR package that can convert typed documents into text, directly from your scanner. The name, SimpleOCR, is quite literal in this case. If you have documents that exhibit any form of complexity, such as columns or that don’t have perfectly crisp scans, SimpleOCR can’t get the job done.
Of course, Simple Software is happy to sell you a more sophisticated solution for a few bucks, but if you just want to OCR some standard blocks of text, this is one option that won’t cost you a penny and is as simple to use as the name suggests. As a bonus, it supports handwriting recognition!
Easy Screen OCR (Windows, Mac, iOS & Android)
Easy Screen OCR is a small, best free OCR software that relies on a cloud-based, Google-powered recognition engine. As you might expect, this means that you need to have an active internet connection for the software to work. If that’s not an issue, you’ll find quite a useful tool here.
This OCR application is intended to extract text from screenshots, letting you copy text from websites or any other text that’s on-screen. What’s particularly cool about this is the support for more than 100 languages. If you want to translate (for example) Japanese text, you can simply take a screenshot and have Easy Screen OCR do it for. If this is something you need to do often, it also helps that you have the option to set custom hotkeys.
While this is not a traditional OCR application, there are plenty of workflows around these days that involve extracting text from the images you’re working with. Easy Screen OCR makes that task as easy as a few keystrokes.
Unfortunately the latest version of the software (1.4.2 and up) requires a subscription fee after 20 uses. However, older versions of the software are still free to use.
Capture2Text (Windows 10)
Capture2Text is an interesting little application with a narrow, but very useful function. It’s used to OCR text from what’s currently on your screen. You press a hotkey, select the zone of the screen you want to OCR and then it sends the result directly to the clipboard, so you can paste it into a word processor.
Capture2Text is a portable application, so you don’t need to install it. Just run the executable and you can use it on any Windows system from version 7 and up. The software is Open Source as well, so you can copy and modify it as you like, as long as you comply with the terms of the GNU license.
It’s not fancy by any means, but if you want to rapidly grab text from images that you are handling, this is a great piece of software to do it.
Free Online Ocr Software For Mac Free
A9t9 (Windows 10)
If you’ve never ventured onto the Windows Store, you may be surprised to find that there are actually plenty of free and Open Source applications there. The a9t9 app is just such a gem and comes with no strings attached at all. There are no adverts and it promises pretty robust OCR performance.
A9t9 supports quite a long list of languages, although not as extensive as some of the other options on this list. If you’re a Windows 8.1 (or up) user who needs OCR right now and don’t want to spend any money, then simply click a single button on the Windows Store app and seconds later a9t9 will be processing your images into documents you can edit.
Adobe Scan (Android & iOS)
Adobe has an absolute ton of mobile apps out in the wild. Some are pretty great, while many seem to be little more than experiments. Adobe Scan falls into the former category. It’s a polished camera scanning and OCR application that will run on either Android or iOS. There’s no charge and you don’t need to be subscribed to any Adobe services.
Ocr Scanner software, free download
Of course, the final document is a PDF, which you can only directly edit with a paid version of Acrobat, but copying the text over to a word processor of your choice is no hassle, if we’re being honest.
One of the best features of the Adobe OCR software is its ability to recognize handwriting. Of course, good quality handwriting will be better recognized. Don’t expect it to decipher something you can’t read yourself. Like your doctor’s prescription notes.
There are a few other reasons to try out Adobe Scan. The ability to automatically scan, OCR and contacts from a business card is very cool. In fact, if you spend a lot of time meeting people, it could save you a heck of a lot of time.
The app also has, as you’d expect from the creators of PhotoShop, a small set of touch-up tools. So you can clean up the images before trying to extract text from them.
Office Lens (Android & iOS)
When the first phones with built-in digital cameras came to market the quality on offer was truly awful. The resulting images weren’t really useful for anything and you certainly couldn’t make out fine detail such as text.
Today, the sophisticated cameras found on even budget models offer high-resolution images that are good enough to use as a replacement for a document scanner. For example, the Google Drive app lets you make some pretty good scans using nothing but your phone camera.
The Office Lens app by Microsoft not only lets you scan documents, it allows you to OCR them on the fly. So you could take a snap of someone’s business card and immediately have the text ready to copy into your contacts list.
Office Lens is a standalone application, but its functionality is being built into other MS Office apps as well, so if you’re already using those it may not be necessary to download this independent app. Then again, sometimes a focused, lightweight app is exactly what the doctor ordered.
English OCR (iOS)
Free Online Ocr Software For Mac Download
English OCR is a free OCR app for iPhone and iPad that makes it pretty easy to quickly take a snap of a document and convert the text in the photo into a digital format. It’s released under an Open Source licence, but the developers use adverts to help carry the costs of developing and supporting the application.
There is a paid “Pro” version that has exactly the same functionality as the free edition. The only difference is that the Pro version removes all adverts. So if you are OK with a few ads, you don’t need to put any money down at all.
Free Online Ocr Software For Mac Windows 7
Reading Between The Lines
The promise of a paperless world has, so far, failed to materialize. Which means OCR technology will remain an important part of the bridge between the digital and analogue worlds.
Free Online Ocr Software For Mac Windows 10
Armed with the OCR apps above, you should never have to laboriously retype a document ever again and, best of all, they won’t cost you a cent.