7 free programs and web services for OCR

Have you down­loaded a scanned doc­u­ment? It turned out that it was saved as an image? It’s OK. Now there are many web ser­vices and com­put­er pro­grams that serve for text recog­ni­tion. How­ev­er, most often they can be used for free.

Readiris 17

There are many pro­grams on the web that can rec­og­nize text. But the trou­ble for many of them is that they do not under­stand the Euro­pean lan­guage. For­tu­nate­ly, there are excep­tions to the rule. For exam­ple, there are no prob­lems with Euro­pean-lan­guage doc­u­ments for
Readiris 17. This appli­ca­tion exists in two ver­sions, sharp­ened for instal­la­tion on Win­dows and Mac OS X. And do not be afraid of the offi­cial web­site, which is in Eng­lish — the inter­face of the pro­gram itself is in Euro­pean.

The appli­ca­tion is able to rec­og­nize text in JPEG, PNG, PDF and many oth­er files. As for sav­ing the result, PDF, DOCX, TXT and many oth­ers are sup­port­ed. In this regard, in gen­er­al, all such pro­grams are sim­i­lar to each oth­er — they have not been lim­it­ed to just one or two for­mats for quite a long time.

The prob­lem with Readiris 17 is that you can only count on a tri­al peri­od that ends 10 days after instal­la­tion. It is unlike­ly that any Exper­tol­ogy read­er will agree to pay from €49 to €199 for a pro­gram, depend­ing on the num­ber of func­tions. How­ev­er, with pro­fes­sion­al use, such an amount can still be jus­ti­fied.

Anoth­er dis­ad­van­tage of Readiris 17 is that you first need to reg­is­ter an account on the devel­op­er’s site. It only takes a cou­ple of min­utes, but many would like to save even such a small amount of time.

Online OCR

We promised to tell not only about appli­ca­tions, but also about web ser­vices. That is exact­ly what it is
Online OCR. This allows you to use it on any device, as long as it sup­ports Inter­net access. This ser­vice tries to rec­og­nize not only plain text, but also tables. The list of for­mats is strict­ly lim­it­ed: these are GIF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, PCX and PDF. The result is saved in DOC, DOCX, TXT, PDF and XLSX for­mats.

By default, the site works even with­out reg­is­tra­tion, which is good news. But at the same time, you will be allowed to rec­og­nize no more than 15 doc­u­ments per hour. For many of our read­ers, this will be enough.

It is curi­ous that reg­is­tra­tion does not mean that only paid text recog­ni­tion will be avail­able to you in the future. On the con­trary, you will increase the lim­it to 50 pages. How­ev­er, not every­thing is so hap­py. You will have access to 50 pages for the entire time you use the ser­vice, there is no ques­tion of any 50 doc­u­ments per hour. It is sad. Each next page will cost you 0.8 cents. More­over, the more you rec­og­nize the text, the low­er the price tag will become. An inter­est­ing pric­ing pol­i­cy that can suit even the pro­fes­sion­al need to rec­og­nize text.

As for the inter­face of this site, it seems to be as sim­ple as pos­si­ble. If you are upload­ing a mul­ti-page doc­u­ment, you can select spe­cif­ic page num­bers to be rec­og­nized — it’s nice that the devel­op­ers have not for­got­ten about this fea­ture. You can also choose one of the many lan­guages ​​in which the doc­u­ment is writ­ten — Euro­pean is also includ­ed in the list.

Per­haps this is a won­der­ful web ser­vice that can eas­i­ly replace any sim­i­lar pro­gram. If only you always had access to the glob­al web! If we talk about the short­com­ings, then we can only high­light the max­i­mum size of the uploaded file — it is lim­it­ed to 200 MB. But one can­not fail to note a nice fea­ture, which con­sists in the abil­i­ty to send sev­er­al files to the web ser­vice at once, pack­ing them into a ZIP archive.

Adobe Scan

Adobe is known for its many pro­fes­sion­al com­put­er pro­grams. Some are designed for video edit­ing, oth­ers for lay­out, and oth­ers for pho­to edit­ing. There is no doubt about the qual­i­ty of its prod­ucts. For some time now, devel­op­ers have begun to cre­ate appli­ca­tions for smart­phones. One of them is called
Adobe Scanit serves to rec­og­nize paper doc­u­ments, then save them in PDF for­mat.

This pro­gram exists both in Google Play and in the App Store. Most impor­tant­ly, it is dis­trib­uted free of charge. The devel­op­ers won’t ask you for a pen­ny, and they won’t load you with ads.

The main dis­ad­van­tage of the appli­ca­tion is that it can­not rec­og­nize text in an already exist­ing image. The pro­gram works exclu­sive­ly with the smart­phone’s cam­era. If you have a bud­get device at your dis­pos­al, then the qual­i­ty of the cam­era may not be enough for suc­cess­ful text recog­ni­tion.

We rec­om­mend that you install Adobe Acro­bat along with this appli­ca­tion. The fact is that Adobe Scan can export the result direct­ly to it. This will allow you to edit the PDF before cre­at­ing it. For exam­ple, you can under­line some phras­es, high­light them, search the text and add com­ments.

office lenses

If you are asked to name the largest soft­ware com­pa­ny, you will most like­ly think of Microsoft almost imme­di­ate­ly. She has been sup­port­ing the office suite for many years, which includes sev­er­al pro­grams. One of them is named
office lens­es — its main task is text recog­ni­tion.

This appli­ca­tion exists on three pop­u­lar plat­forms. Under Win­dows con­di­tions, this is a fair­ly large pro­gram that tries to rec­og­nize the text con­tained in a PDF file or some kind of image. Well, on Android and iOS, the appli­ca­tion has a sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er weight. Here it main­ly works with the cam­era and the pho­tos tak­en ear­li­er. In fact, the pro­gram turns a smart­phone into a portable scan­ner. Adjust­ed for the qual­i­ty of the cam­era, of course. The pho­tographed doc­u­ment can then be saved in DOCX, PDF and even PPTX for­mats. The lat­ter allows you to cre­ate a pre­sen­ta­tion based on the rec­og­nized text.

This pro­gram is dis­trib­uted free of charge. It does not require an Office 365 sub­scrip­tion. It would seem that beau­ty! How­ev­er, there is also a fly in the oint­ment. The appli­ca­tion does not cope well with the recog­ni­tion of Euro­pean-lan­guage text. It hon­est­ly tries, but some­times errors still creep into the text.

FineReader

At the time it was
FineRead­er best at text recog­ni­tion. Strict­ly speak­ing, the cre­ation of the ABBYY stu­dio remains the leader to this day. Its prob­lems are by no means in the main func­tion­al­i­ty.

FineRead­er is a unique case where a ser­vice has mul­ti­ple guis­es. To begin with, you can use a web­site by rec­og­niz­ing text with it. This is espe­cial­ly true if your doc­u­ment con­sists of a cou­ple of pages, and in the future you are unlike­ly to solve a sim­i­lar prob­lem. Also, the cor­re­spond­ing appli­ca­tion can be found on Google Play and the App Store. It is rec­om­mend­ed to use it if you need to rec­og­nize text from a paper doc­u­ment, and you do not have a scan­ner. And final­ly, there is a com­put­er pro­gram FineRead­er designed for Win­dows. It is she who has the largest num­ber of sup­port­ed for­mats.

The com­put­er ver­sion of the appli­ca­tion is able to save the doc­u­ment in almost any form. Even FB2 and RTF book for­mats are sup­port­ed here. This hints that FineRead­er is ide­al for full-fledged scan­ning of paper books. Well, if you rec­og­nize the table, then the result can be saved in XLSX for­mat. Not for­got­ten here are the most pop­u­lar DOCX with PDF.

This pro­gram almost per­fect­ly copes with its main task. No mat­ter what lan­guage the doc­u­ment is writ­ten in! But for such qual­i­ty you have to pay a con­sid­er­able price. After reg­is­tra­tion, you will be able to rec­og­nize only 10 pages. Every month you will receive 5 pages as a bonus. Do I need to say that this is not suit­able for pro­fes­sion­al pur­pos­es? As for the sub­scrip­tion, a year of using the pro­gram will cost you €129. At this time, you will be able to rec­og­nize 5000 pages. This amount also includes access to the PDF edi­tor. This means that you can under­line the rec­og­nized text, cross it out, and per­form oth­er actions with it.

Microsoft OneNote

Above, we have already talked about one cre­ation of Microsoft. But it was, one might say, part of the office pack­age. That pro­gram was intend­ed strict­ly for text recog­ni­tion. But there is also an appli­ca­tion in the arse­nal of this com­pa­ny in which recog­ni­tion is only a sec­ondary func­tion. It’s about
OneNote — a com­peti­tor to the famous, but damn expen­sive Ever­note.

This pro­gram exists not only in com­put­er, but also in mobile inter­pre­ta­tion. But the text recog­ni­tion func­tion should only be looked for in ver­sions designed for Mac OS X and Win­dows.

Basi­cal­ly this appli­ca­tion serves as a notepad. You can save all sorts of notes in it, and then access them from any device. You can also upload images here. If they con­tain text, then it can be rec­og­nized. To do this, right-click on the pic­ture, after which it remains only to click the “Copy text from pic­ture” but­ton. All con­tent will imme­di­ate­ly move to the clip­board. Now you can paste text any­where.

You could already guess the dis­ad­van­tage of Microsoft OneNote. With this pro­gram, you are unlike­ly to be able to save the doc­u­ment in its orig­i­nal form. Also, this appli­ca­tion suf­fers from the sup­port of not a very large num­ber of for­mats. How­ev­er, for many of our read­ers, OneNote fea­tures should be enough. And they will also like the fact that this pro­gram is dis­trib­uted free of charge. But you will have to reg­is­ter a Microsoft account. If you are using the Win­dows 10 oper­at­ing sys­tem, then you prob­a­bly already have it!

img2txt

This is a sim­ple Euro­pean-lan­guage web ser­vice that earns only by dis­play­ing ads. You can upload an image saved in JPEG or PNG for­mat to it. The resource also sup­ports PDF files. It should be not­ed that
img2txt No won­der it occu­pies the last line of our rat­ing. This site does not rec­og­nize text well if it is writ­ten in dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Also, prob­lems arise when work­ing with a PDF file, where the text is writ­ten on the back­ground of the image. Well, you def­i­nite­ly have to for­get about the hand­writ­ten text — the sys­tem will not under­stand it.

As for sav­ing the mate­r­i­al, you can get a PDF, TXT, ODF or DOCX file as an out­put.

We rec­om­mend that you first rec­og­nize the text using img2txt. And if the result does not suit you, you can try using one of the ser­vices dis­cussed above. And do not think that only Euro­pean use this site. No, it has already been trans­lat­ed into 9 lan­guages. The glob­al pop­u­lar­i­ty of the online ser­vice is also evi­denced by the num­ber of processed requests, which has already reached 10.6 mil­lion. By the way, img2txt does not require you to reg­is­ter an account. This dis­tin­guish­es the site from oth­er sim­i­lar resources and pro­grams.

Conclusion

Now you know exact­ly how to rec­og­nize text in a down­loaded image. To do this, you can use a web ser­vice or a com­put­er pro­gram. Note that pro­fes­sion­al solu­tions are expen­sive, but their instal­la­tion is nec­es­sary only for those who need text recog­ni­tion on an ongo­ing basis — almost every day.