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Working with text on your computer offers a range of possibilities in searching and editing that simply aren't available with hard copy text. Check out these five text recognition tools to get your printed text into your computer.
5 Ways to OCR Documents on Your Mac. By Jordan Merrick 2 May 2013. Difficulty: Beginner. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. Whenever you scan a document, the scanner itself has no way of knowing what the difference between text and an image is, so everything you scan is effectively an image. Evernote is free, with premium.
- There are free OCR tools on Mac but the problem is that they are mainly online and they’re not very accurate. In most cases, they will only give you a text dump and none of the formatting or page layout will be preserved.
- In order for you to extract text from scanned PDF files on your Mac, you can rely on iSkysoft PDF Converter Pro for Mac. This program can helps you convert image-based PDF files to Word, Excel, Text and other popular formats with the advanced OCR technology. 17 languages are supported, including English, Spanish, French and more.
- Things You Need to Know about OCR Mac? What Does OCR Stand For? OCR (Optical Character Recognition), it is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.
- The Best Free Voice Recognition Software app downloads for Mac: Express Scribe Professional for Mac Dragon Dictate MacSpeech Dictate Medical CK's Text.
Photo by mmechinita.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been around for decades but only recently has become both economical and easy enough to use that it is within the reach of the average consumer. Today we're looking at Lifehacker readers' five favorite applications for turning physical text into machine-readable virtual text.
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Adobe Acrobat (Windows/Mac, From $130)
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A solid OCR system is one of the most overlooked features of Adobe Acrobat. Included in all versions from Adobe Acrobat Standard to Pro Extended and tucked in a sub-menu, the OCR functionality in Adobe is robust and works with both scanned and already saved documents. Many people already have a copy of Acrobat at home or at work and find that the OCR quality is high enough that they have little reason to invest the money in a dedicated OCR tool.
Evernote (Windows/Mac, Free) / OneNote (Windows, $65)
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We grouped Evernote and OneNote together because they share a common limitation. Neither application was designed to serve as a standalone OCR tool, so the OCR capabilities of both are intended simply to supplement the primary purpose of the tool—taking great notes. To that end, however, if your OCR needs are few and mostly centered on pulling in hard-copy text to your note-taking/research workflow, both Evernote and OneNote are great solutions. If you need text recognition with a large volume of documents with high page counts, however, you'll likely want to find another OCR solution, as these two apps aren't particularly well-suited for dealing with anything bigger than indexing the text of business cards and low-volume documents.
OmniPage (Windows, From $149)
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At this point we're getting away from products that serve the needs of infrequent OCR users and moving into products that are feature-packed and exclusively focused on OCR. OmniPage has a powerful OCR engine, excellent format and layout recognition and preservation, and integration with popular applications—including one-click text-recognition support in Microsoft Office and a send-to-Kindle function. OmniPage supports multiple languages, batch processing, and exports to multiple common document formats.
ABBYY FineReader (Windows/Mac, $399.99)
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ABBYY FineReader has an astounding number of features and OCR tricks—as it should, for the hefty price tag of $399. FineReader excels at recognition of text and formatting across a wide range of inputs—scanned text, existing documents, camera captures, and more—with support for over 180 languages. It can recognize text in images, barcodes, and other elements most basic OCR tools would miss. FineReader integrates with popular office applications and comes programmed with 'quick tasks' to make common scanning workflows a one-click affair. ABBYY FineReader is available for both Windows and Mac OS X, although Mac users are limited to the FineReader Express package ($99) a light version of the full FineReader package.
Readiris (Windows/Mac, $129)
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Readiris technology is the OCR engine behind the OCR features in popular applications like Adobe Acrobat, but it's also the same tech that powers their standalone OCR software. Readiris supports over 120 languages—with additional packages available for Asian and Middle Eastern languages. The application scans and sends documents directly to your favorite application, creates and converts PDF files, and generates smaller documents by using their proprietary compression techniques to radically shrink documents for easy transmission and archiving. Readiris also supports text recognition in images and handwritten notes.
Pdf Text Recognition Mac Free
Now that you've had a chance to look over the feature sets of five of the most popular text recognition tools, it's time to cast a vote for your favorite:
Which Text Recognition Tool Is Best?customer surveys
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Have a tip, trick, or tool you want to share to help your fellow readers get better OCR scans? Let's hear about it in the comments.
Jul 18,2019 • Filed to: OCR PDF
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 OCR handwriting recognition software tools 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. iSkysoft PDF Converter Pro
iSkysoft PDF Converter Pro for Mac (or iSkysoft PDF Converter for Windows) is also a great tool when it comes to OCR scanned PDFs. You can import image-based PDFs to the program and enable OCR. You can then convert the PDF to other formats.
#3. OCR Desktop
Combined with artificial intelligence and neural networks, the OCR desktop application provides for outstanding results. This PDF to text converter includes more than four million font variations, which ensures your converted text is as accurate as possible. It also includes the latest OCR technology that picks up handwritten text extremely well. Plus, it is free for personal use. It does include advertisements however, so you will need to get the registered version if you don’t want to see them.
#4. SimpleOCR
SimpleOCR is one of the most popular free OCR tools available online. It is pretty simple, but it also includes OCR to convert scanned PDF – including all your needs for OCR handwriting. However, if you need advanced functions, you will need the paid version.
Text Recognition For Mac
#5. TopOCR
Text Recognition Software Mac Free
TopOCR promises to offer users the best OCR results for digital cameras. If you have a letter you want to digitize, take a picture of it, and let TopOCR to do the rest. Unfortunately, the app is no longer free. But they use sophisticated image processing algorithms to ensure great results, so it may be worth the price.
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.