Jun 11,2020 • Filed to: OCR PDF
Aug 02, 2018 What is OCR? Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is the technology that allows software to recognize text within an image.It thus performs a vital stage in the process of converting raster text to vector text. In fact, OCR’s ability to extract text from graphics or documents makes it an incredibly useful tool across a wide range of industries. And OCR is applied to make these scanned files to be editable. For a Mac user, using the best OCR software for mac is often considered as the easiest way to do the OCR job. Key of The Best OCR Software for Mac. Then, what is the key point to make a program be the best OCR software for mac?
OCR – Optical Character Recognition - This recent OCR technology converts handwritten text to editable and searchable text on your computer. You can OCR scanned PDFs or image-based PDFs to digital files and convert scanned handwriting to text. The technology was developed in 1933, and progresses every year. Now OCR tools can convert newspapers, letters, books, and handwritten or printed material as editable text for computer. The handwriting OCR technology is extremely accurate in translating fonts and text types to accurate digital text. In this article we’ll recommend the top 5 handwriting recognition software to use, including PDFelement Pro.
Part 1. Recommended OCR Handwriting Recognition Software
#1. PDFelement Pro
PDFelement Pro is a perfect OCR tool for PDF files. It can automatically recognize scanned PDFs and make it editable with built-in editing tools. This tool offers several OCR languages to choose from and lets you edit your text images, and other PDF elements.
Key Features of this OCR tool for PDFs:
- Advanced OCR functionalities allow you to convert and edit scanned PDFs easily.
- Editing PDF text, images, and links is as easy as making changes in Word.
- Add signatures, passwords, watermarks, signs, and free-hand shapes in PDFs with ease.
- Easy markup and annotation tools
- You can easily create PDFs from a wide range of document formats.
- You can also convert PDF files to other formats like Excel, MS Word and more.
#2. OmniPage Ultimate
Combined with artificial intelligence and neural networks, the OmniPage Ultimate software provides for outstanding results. This handwriting OCR recognition includes more than 120 language recognition, which ensures your converted text is as accurate as possible. It also includes the latest OCR technology that picks up handwritten text extremely well. It can make your PDF document easily editable, shareable and searchable. Moreover, you can get free trial from their official website.
#3. SimpleOCR
SimpleOCR is one of the most popular free handwriting recognition software available online. It is pretty simple, but it also includes OCR to convert scanned handwriting PDF – including all your needs for OCR handwriting. However, if you need advanced functions, you will need the paid version.
#4. ABBYY FineReader
ABBYY is a company which focus on OCR industry for many years. ABBYY FineReader offers users the best OCR results for digital cameras. The latest ABBYY FineReader features AI-based OCR technology, which provide easier to digitize, retrieve, edit, share, and protection all kinds of COR documents.
Part 2. Tips for OCR Handwriting Recognition
Usage of OCR Technology: OCR technology can be extremely useful for many professionals. You can digitize any handwritten document quickly and easily, and turn it into editable text that you can modify on your computer.
Tips: For best OCR results, make sure your documents are clear and use a powerful scanner. Most importantly, choose a professional OCR program, like PDFelement Pro, that guarantees accurate results. You can also try to use online tools, but keep in mind they are quite limited.
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)
Home design software for mac reviews. 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.
Best Ocr Software Free
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.
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.
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.
Free system cleaning software for mac. 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)
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.
Reading Between The Lines
Free Microsoft Ocr Software Download
The promise of a paperless world has, so far, failed to materialize. How to turn off startup apps on mac. Which means OCR technology will remain an important part of the bridge between the digital and analogue worlds.
Apple Ocr Software
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.