OCR
Not every document that has been typed out or written has been neatly uploaded to the Internet. Things such as handouts from your teacher or professor may be hard to read physically, or you may be worried about misplacing them despite their importance. Documents from a co-worker or your boss that were given to you physically but also need to be emailed or otherwise handled electronically can also be a huge inconvenience if they cannot simply be scanned, as the text may need to be cited, copied, or pasted. This is where optical character recognition technology comes in.
OCR enables documents that exist physically to be converted into a PDF readable by software such as Adobe Reader or your web browser of choice. Not only that, but you can select text as if you typed out the document then and there yourself! Outside of dedicated software like ABBYY FineReader, OCR is a feature that exists in software such as Evernote and Microsoft Office OneNote.
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Evernote
Evernote is a cross-platform, freemium app designed for note taking, organizing, and archiving.
Microsoft OneNote
A digital notebook application that gives people one place to gather notes and information. .
Google Docs (Suite)
Google Docs is a free, Web-based office suite. It offers a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation program, graphics application, and a form designer.
ABBYY FineReader
ABBYY FineReader is an OCR software that provides unmatched text recognition accuracy and conversion capabilities, virtually eliminating retyping and reformatting of documents. Up to 190 languages are supported for text recognition.
Sikuli
Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots).
PDF-XChange Editor
The smallest, fastest, most feature-rich PDF editor/viewer available * Full Direct Content Editing (text based PDFs, not scanned/image based PDFs) * Includes OCR feature
Scanbot
Scanbot is the leading Document and QR Code scanner app for iOS and Android. You can create premium quality scans of every document. Edit, sign and upload them to your cloud.
Nitro Pro
Nitro Pro gives you everything you need to create, convert, edit, sign, and share 100% industry-standard PDF files.
ScanTailor
Scan Tailor is an interactive post-processing tool for scanned pages. It performs operations such as page splitting, deskewing, adding/removing borders, and others.
Xodo
Xodo is the ultimate cross-platform PDF viewer and annotator. Powerful, fast, and optimized for all phones and tablets, Xodo makes it easy to access, edit, mark up, sort, share, sync, manage, sign, and more with even the most complex PDF documents.
GImageReader
gImageReader is a simple Gtk/Qt front-end to the Tesseract OCR Engine.Features: - Import PDF documents and images from disk, scanning devices, clipboard and screenshots
TesseractcontentCrawler
contentCrawler is an integrated analysis, processing and reporting framework that assesses documents in a DMS for bulk processing.
ABBYY Screenshot Reader
Screenshot Reader is a smart OCR-screenshot application for capturing text and images from any area on your PC screen and extracting text from them or just saving as an image.
PaperOffice
PaperOffice is an innovative document management solution for the paperless office, good for home and small business users. Perfect text recognition, live keyword search and SQL-based revision-proof data storage. Bulk import of PaperPort documents.
(a9t9) Free OCR Software
open-source OCR software and web service to extract text from image files and PDF. The application is available as online OCR web app, OCR API, or simple to install Windows store application ( to use, open-source and 100% spyware ).
Shape Business Card Reader
Import contact information from business cards directly to your iPhone/iPod Touch, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile contacts!
Online OCR
Free Online OCR is a software that allows you to convert scanned PDF and images into editable Word, Text, Excel output formats.
Able2Extract Professional
A cross-platform PDF converter, creator, and editor: secure, sign, annotate, redact PDFs & more!.
Scanitto Pro
Scanitto Pro is Windows-based software application for image scanning, direct printing and copying, basic editing and text recognition (OCR).
gscan2pdf
gscan2pdf can scan, clean the scan and do OCR on the scan or imported images (incl. existing PDFs, DjVus or other file types), and make PDF and DjVu-files with embedded OCR-text.