In the first OCR program I used you had to draw in every letter in a grid, this had to be done for all size fonts, and types, that is bold and italic and it took days just for one font, and it still was useless!.
Fortunately, we have moved on since then but not too far according to my test on today's download.
It made a complete hash of an image from a car auto manual that had been scanned.
Recently, I've been testing OCR programs including OmniPage, and non-have fared well except ABBYY which quite frankly is in a class of its own.
I used it on the same page that I tested today's download on and even though the image was a rather washed out looking page it was just short of perfect.
My first introduction to ABBYY OCR was when it came free with a printer.
It is so good that I found the best way of converting many PDF documents is to convert them to an image and then use it.
Recently, I found Ashraf’s recommendation UniPDF, to be by far the best converter of non-image PDF files.
If you need to convert PDF files, normal and image, use UniPDF and ABBYY and you have all the bases covered.
Frankly, today's download is comparatively is a waste of disk space.

XP-Man  –  11 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+92)

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No bad...easy to use GUI, can edit the OCR results with a built-in text editor, thus enabling you to edit scanned PDF files without using Word

It also gives you the option to convert one single page, a range of pages, or the entire PDF file in batch mode (supports even the Italian Language....woh, simply unbelievable...LOL!!)

As for conversion quality, I found it pretty GOOD with regard to TEXT only...not so good when required to extract text from images.

But if you want a better and more professional OCR product (for instance an ABBYY OCR software) you have to pay more, of course!!!

THUMBS UP from me!

BEST FREE ALTERNATIVES

http://www.ocronline.com (==> Supports over 153 languages)
http://www.paperfile.net (==> It also uses the powerful Tesseract engine by Google like this GAOTD)
http://capture2text.sourceforge.net

And to create a PDF file directly from scanned documents and images for FREE:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Free-Scan-to-PDF.shtml
http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/WinScan2PDF

Enjoy!

Giovanni  –  11 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+89)

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Pros
*Allows you to extract text from PDF files — quickly converts text in a PDF document into an editable text document
*Intuitive interface that is simple for almost everyone to figure out
*Can be used as a standard PDF viewer (although we don't recommend it)

Cons
*Hit-or-miss conversion quality

Free Alternatives
gImageReader (not specific to PDFs but an OCR program nonetheless)

Final Verdict
Click here for final verdict and full review

Ashraf  –  11 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+75)

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#13 Giovanni
Sometimes if a job needs doing properly you have to pay, today I pointed out a program that does its job exceptionally well.
I did it in the hope that it would help people from wasting their money on programs that performs badly.
This appears to have upset you and for the life of me I cannot understand why.

XP-Man  –  11 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+20)

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For a frontend to free Tesseract engine it's quite costly. Some people try to harvest from other people's seed. Unfortunately this software is not the only one.

By the way a Readiris variant (restricted to scanned text) I got with a Kodak scanner-printer got quite good results i.e. only a few corrections needed. Unfortunately I can't compare it to ABBY as my version is quite outdated and two updates of good software sum up to the price of the latest versions.

As I don't need it often ...

But I've got a good advice for all those who hate to empty their printer cartridges just because the background of a PDF is fully coloured.

Former comment I didn't succeed to transfer to GOTD:

My only reason for converting PDFs to doc etc. has been for editing, e.g. to erase coloured background before printing which costs up to 60 times more ink (3 colours!) than pure black on white and thus emptying your cartridges in a hurry.

If it's the same for you, Adobe Acrobat can print black on white, too, but is too costly. But there is free PDF-XChange Viewer (portable). Goto Edit, Preferences, Accessibility and select "Override Document Colours" and then "Use Custom Colour Scheme". After changing colour to your wishes (Line Art? Fill Colour?): "Apply". By the way there is a predefined colour scheme for black and white, too.

Working effectively I have "installed" portable variant twice to allow a quick comparison of author's PDF and black and white.

PDF-XChange Viewer OCR + portable (multilanguage):
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/downloads

FrancisBorne  –  11 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+19)

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