Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology allows editing text in a graphic image or scanned document. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping system in an office, or to publish the text on a website.
OCR makes it possible to edit the text, search for a word or phrase, and apply techniques such as machine translation, text-to-speech, and text mining to it.
Microsoft Office includes Microsoft Document Imaging OCR. However, several other freeware alternatives exist which do the job, too, including the application software that comes with your scanner or all-in-one device.
Essentially, to scan and then convert an image to text using OCR, you need to follow the standard steps:
- Place the document on the scanner bed.
- On the computer, use the scanner’s application software and OCR as type.
- Select the intended area for an OCR scan, and check the preview.
- Scan and then save the text file, and you can edit the same in any word-processing application.
Free Online OCR sites and services
While you can use Google Drive to convert Images to Text (OCR), several other free online OCR services on the web allow you to perform an OCR on an image or scanned document within your browser.
- NewOCR.com is a free online OCR service. NewOCR.com analyses the text in any image file that you upload and then converts the text from the image into text. The service allows unlimited uploads and layout analysis (multi-column text recognition). The friendly service requires no registration and supports 29 languages, although the site is pretty basic and amateurish. The service takes any JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, and multipage TIFF up to 5 MB as well as multipage PDF documents up to 20 MB.
- Free-OCR.com is another free online OCR tool. You can upload your image files (JPG, GIF, TIFF BMP or PDF) not larger than 2MB, no wider or higher than 5000 pixels and there is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour. Free-OCR can handle images with multi-column text and also supports 29 languages. One odd restriction is that it takes only the first page of a PDF document while performing OCR.
- OnlineOCR.net service allows you to recognize text and characters from PDF scanned documents (including multipage files), photographs and digital camera-captured images. It allows users to select 32 languages to recognize multilingual documents and converts directly to several formats like PDF, DOC, XLS, RTF, HTML, and TXT. You can choose to store the OCRed files online in your secure workspace or download them to your PC.
Some other sites are:
- Totext.net
- ConvertImagetoText.net
- OCRconvert.com
- Ocronline.com
- ConvertPDFtoWord.net
- I2ocr.com
- FineReaderOnline.com.
You can also choose to install an application to perform OCR instead of the scanner’s default program.
FreeOCR can scan from most TWAIN and WIA scanners and can also open scanned PDF’s and multipage TIFF images. Free OCR includes the Windows-compiled Tesseract free OCR engine also known as a Tesseract GUI. FreeOCR is freeware, including for commercial use. FreeOCR requires the .NET Framework v2.0. It is available for download at paperfile.net.
TIP: There are more free OCR software for Windows available.
I’m sure this list isn’t exhaustive. Why don’t you add more such services and applications as comments to this post, if you know of any more?
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