Topic: OCR Program

[Skhilled (OP)]

Anyone know of a really good one? I'm trying to get the fav recipes out of my magazines without retyping them all. My first thought was to scan them into Photoshop and then save them as .pdf's but then the files will be a tad large. They would be great for viewing but not so good on resources. I did find a program that shrinks pdf's but can't remember where it was. LOL

Anyways, I'm in need of a good ocr to save my fingers from too much typing.

[Ken]

Never used ORC very much because they cost so much... tried a demo of OmniPage some years back and it's supposed to be the best, but it costs a ton.

It's been a while, so I don't remember what free ones I tried, but there are some of course.

[Skhilled (OP)]

Yeah, I was hoping to find one without the usual trial and error approach. LOL

[Skhilled (OP)]

I think I found one. Have to test it first.

http://topocr.com

[Skhilled (OP)]

This works very well. I've only tested it with scanning recipes from magazines but I only have very minimal editing to do after scanning. Saves me a ton of typing!!!  :danban:

You have to keep in mind that OCR programs work best when you have the same fonts/typefaces installed on your PC that whatever you are scanning is using.

[Skhilled (OP)]

Hmmm, pages with background images behind the text do not work as well. You'll need to adjust the settings to make it work better with those.

[Lesmond]

Found another free one here Steve http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/FreeOCR.shtml

FreeOCR.net description
   
A complete scan and OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine 2.01.

FreeOCR is a complete scan and OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine 2.01.

FreeOCR is small, simple and easy-to-use, and it includesa Windows installer and supports multi-page tiff's, fax documents as well as most image types including compressed Tiff's which the Tesseract engine on its own cannot read.

It now has Twain scanning included and support for multipage Tiff documents. Best of all it is totally free !

The Tesseract free OCR engine is an open source product released by Google. It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995.

In 1995 it was one of the top 3 performers at the OCR accuracy contest organized by University of Nevada in Las Vegas.

FreeoOCR has been totally rewritten for Microsoft's .Net Framework V2.0 This was mainly due to problems with displaying unicode text properly which most older development environments sadly do not support. We have added a .net on the end of FreeOCR to differentiate this from the older versions.

Unicode is important as the OCR engine now supports different languages and outputs them in UTF-8 encoding and with the older versions of FreeOCR non standard characters could not be displayed.

Requirements:

? Pentium Processor - 200MHz
? 256 MB Memory (RAM)
? 10MB Free Disk Space
? SVGA Resolution Display
? Net Framework 2.0 or higher

And another here http://jocr.sourceforge.net/index.html

You may find this of interest too http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-free-ocr-software-tools-to-convert-your-images-into-text-nb/

[Ken]

Good finds there Les. 

Downloaded the FreeORC and gave it a quick try and it worked great.

It's simple and easy to use and the first pass on one of Mom's journal pages (jpg file type) resulted in a document that is very close, with only a few glitches in the text. Plus having the side-by-side comparison view makes it easy to correct those misspelled or incorrect words.

In this image you can see the jpg picture and the resulting conversion, the first red box shows how it rendered the drawings in the image and the second red box shows some of the text that got distorted... the text is not really that far off and for a free utility it ain't bad.  :disted:

[Ken]

When you look at the image above you'll see that there's a button for exporting your rendered text into Word. Using the function the text was opened in Word and I did a rough edit on about half of the text and then left the rest so that you could see how it looks. The editing took me about 4-5 minutes.

I awoke this morning feeling much better, recovering from a very serious illness. I have congestive heart failure and A-fib all the time and either one could cause my heart to stop
at any moment. But the illness I am recovering from was Gout and it had caused my legs
and feet to swell to a huge size and huge water blisters appeared all over my legs. The
skin broke down and cracked open and body fluids ran from the cracks. I had bacterial
infection in my legs and the skin was dark red. My flesh on my legs was swollen so bad it
Felt like pork. not like human skin. Then there appeared a ring around my ankles that
looked like the flesh was dying. We were sure that I was going to loose my legs. l knew
that l could not survive that S0 we put my name in the Temple of The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints at Washington DC where Church Members. hundreds of them prayed for me every day for three weeks. l began to slowly recover from this horrible
illness till I have reached the point that now, the swelling is gone and the pain is much less and l can work on the computer again and talk to my friends on the computer.

---------------

So when l
woke up this morning l lay there in my vvarrn bed feeling contforlable and thankful that l
am over another brush with death and Ieeling thankful to my Lord Jesus Christ for being
there For me when I needed Il im most. Time after time. Ile has snatched me from the jaws
ot` death and saved me tor some reason. I lay there struggled up in my warm bed. thinking
about this and wondering why He has done this for me. I am almost 92 years old and
contined to a wheelchair. What can I do tor Jesus to let people know what l-Ie has done tor
me. To show people how great and marvelous He is. The answer came to me mediately.
The computer! That is the only way [ can show the world His Glory and Honor His name,
Lord Jesus. help me to use the time l have lelt to let my little light shine so l can tell others
about the Lord Jesus. and to somehow make the path easier for somconc else who is
struggling on a dark road. let my little light shine so they can see the Great light. Jesus

[Lesmond]

I just done Mallies Light, and I found that its best to do small section at a time, worked perfect for me :2tumb:

I didnt have to edit any at all!

I awoke this morning feeling much better, recovering from a very serious illness. I have
congestive heart failure and A-fib all the time , and either one could cause my heart to stop
at any moment. But the illness I am recovering from was Gout and it had caused my legs
and feet to swell to a huge size and huge water blisters appeared all over my legs. The
skin broke down and cracked open and body fluids ran from the cracks. I had bacterial
infection in my legs and the skin was dark red. My flesh on my legs was swollen so bad it
felt like pork, not like human skin. Then there appeared a ring around my ankles that
looked like the flesh was dying. We were sure that I was going to loose my legs. I knew
that I could not survive that so we put my name in the Temple of The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints at Washington DC where Church Members, hundreds of them,
prayed for me every day for three weeks. I began to slowly recover from this horrible
illness till I have reached the point that now, the swelling is gone and the pain is much less
and I can work on the computer again and talk to my friends on the computer. So when I
woke up this morning I lay there in my warm bed feeling comfortable and thankful that I
am over another brush with death and feeling thankful to my Lord Jesus Christ for being
there for me when I needed Him most. Time after time, He has snatched me from the jaws
of death and saved me for some reason. I lay there snuggled up in my warm bed, thinking
about this and wondering why He has done this for me. I am almost 92 years old and
confined to a wheelchair. What can I do for Jesus to let people know what He has done for
me. To show people how great and marvelous He is. The answer came to me mediately.
The computer! That is the only way I can show the world His Glory and Honor His name.
Lord Jesus, help me to use the time I have left to let my little light shine so I can tell others
about the Lord Jesus, and to somehow make the path easier for someone else who is
struggling on a dark road, let my little light shine so they can see the Great light, Jesus

[Ken]

You didn't need to do any edits?

[Lesmond]

None has far has I can see, that what I mean by doing sections of text at a time

[Skhilled (OP)]

I saw freeocr during my searching but didn't try it yet. I have the same issues as freeocr (and most ocr programs) but not too many. Only minor edits to make. The problems is when it tries to render fonts that are not installed on your pc and/or the what you are trying to read is not crystal clear.

I've been scanning a ton of recipes I have out of mags and pages that I've printed out with very little or no editing.

[Ken]

Been reading some of them on FG. 

[Skhilled (OP)]

It's going a lot faster than I expected. LOL

At this rate, I can get a lot of my recipes online in a week that would have taken me months!