How to convert scanned images into PDFs into edit-ready text

freeocr2

User’s Eye view

Many times we take a pile of paper and scan it and create a PDF file. There are two types of PDF documents – those created by sending Office files, images, etc. to an Acrobat like PDF printer and those created by scanning physical paper like pages of a book, legal documents, etc. You also might scan a document so that you can email it to another user, or you may simply want a scanned copy for safekeeping.

In most cases, if one scans a document directly to PDF, or scans and then converts it to PDF, the document will be transferred as a large image file. Each page will be made up from one large image, containing all the text, tables, images and graphics. Also, the text on the page is not searchable, neither selectable.

Now to make it search able and editable you must first convert the image of the document into text manually.
“Manually?” Sounds rigorous!

The solution

free ocr

In this case you need “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR) software which is a visual recognition process that turns printed or written text into an electronic character-based file. OCR makes it possible to edit the text, search for a word or phrase, store it more compactly, display or print a copy free of scanning artifacts.

FreeOCR.net is a list of totally free OCR (Optical character recognition) software packages available to download. It recognizes many file types like PDF, TIF, BMP, JPG and PNG. The simple user interface allows you to exclude non-text elements (such as images or tables), although this has to be done manually.

For documents with multiple pages, each individual page has to be processed by the user separately, although FreeOCR will “pool” the output into a single text. FreeOCR is a freeware and you can do what you like with it, including commercial use.

Compatibility

Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, Windows 7.

Languages supported:
English comes pre-installed, but other languages can be installed separately.

Languages include:

French, Italian, German/Fraktur, Spanish, Dutch, Vietnamese, Bangla, Czech, Catalan, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Korean, Slovakian, Ukranian, Japanese, Indonesian, Norwegian, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Tagalog, Romanian, Chinese (traditional & simplified) and Swedish.

System requirements:

Operating System Recommended Minimum Specification
Windows 2000 Pentium Processor - 200MHz
Windows 2003 256 MB Memory (RAM)
Windows XP 32 bit 10MB Free Disk Space
Windows Vista (all editions) SVGA Resolution Display
Windiws 7 (all) .Net Framework 2.0 or higher

Hotness meter 
Rating: Good 8/10

Verdict

Quite frankly, I wish I knew about this simple way to use freely available OCR software back in my school days. Of course, we didn’t have camera mobile phones or inexpensive Ddigicams, but wouldn’t it have saved hours of copying notes?
Ah, modern technology is wonderful; take a scanned image (or take a snap using a mobile camera/digicam) and presto – OCR software extracts all the information from the image into easily editable text format.

Posted in: multimedia