{"id":24,"date":"2010-08-27T19:01:10","date_gmt":"2010-08-27T10:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/santoshkori.com\/blog\/?p=24"},"modified":"2012-03-05T22:27:10","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T13:27:10","slug":"the-best-ocr-tools-for-converting-images-to-textso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/the-best-ocr-tools-for-converting-images-to-textso\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best OCR Tools for Converting Images to TextSo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\/\/ < ![CDATA[\nvar google_adnum = 0;\nfunction google_ad_request_done(google_ads) {\n var u = ''; var i;\n if (google_ads.length == 0) {\n    return;\n  } else {\n      for (i = 0; i < google_ads.length; ++i) {\n        u += '<a href=\"' + google_ads[i].url + '\">' + google_ads[i].line1 + '\n' + google_ads[i].line2 + ' ' + google_ads[i].line3 + '   <a href=\"' + google_ads[i].url + '\">' + google_ads[i].visible_url + '<\/a>';\n       if (i < google_ads.length - 1) u += ' &nbsp; ';\n      }\n     u = '\n\n\n\n<div><a href=\"' + google_info.feedback_url + '\">Ads by Google<\/a> ' + u + '<\/p>\n<p>';\n    }\n   google_adnum = google_adnum + google_ads.length;\n  document.write(u);\n  return;\n}\ngoogle_ad_client = 'pub-3152670624293746';google_ad_output = 'js';google_ad_type = 'text';google_feedback = 'on';google_language = 'en';google_encoding = 'utf8';\ngoogle_max_num_ads = '2';\ngoogle_ad_channel='9126605320';\ngoogle_skip = google_adnum;\n\/\/ ]]><\/script> <script src=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script>OCR software let you easily convert images, such as <a title=\"Digital Photo\" href=\"http:\/\/img.labnol.org\/files\/digital-photograph.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">digital photographs<\/a>, <a title=\"Scanned Paper Document\" href=\"http:\/\/img.labnol.org\/files\/paper-receipt.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">scanned documents<\/a>, <a title=\"Newspaper Clipping\" href=\"http:\/\/img.labnol.org\/files\/newspaper-clipping.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">printed books<\/a>,  etc. into text. Once you perform OCR on an image, you\u2019ll be able to  copy-paste or edit the text content of that image without any retyping  and it also becomes more searchable.<!--more--><\/p>\n<h2>The Best Web-based OCR Services<\/h2>\n<p>Most scanners ship with some sort of OCR software but if you don\u2019t  have a scanner, you can simply capture a photograph of the printed text  with your digital camera or even your mobile phone and then use an  online OCR utility to extract text out of that image.<\/p>\n<p>Meet the best online OCR services that can help you convert images into text.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. <\/strong><a title=\"Upload Files to Google Docs\" href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/DocAction?action=updoc&amp;hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Google Docs<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 When you upload an image file or a scanned PDF to Google Docs, check  the option that says \u201cConvert text to Google Docs format\u201d and Google  Docs will automatically perform OCR on the file before saving it to your  account.<\/p>\n<p>If the OCR operation is successful, all the extracted text is stored  as a new document else Google Docs will store your original image  without any modification.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/img.labnol.org\/di\/google_docs_OCR.png\" alt=\"google docs OCR\" width=\"540\" height=\"210\" title=\"\"><\/p>\n<p>With Google Docs, you can perform OCR on images and PDFs as large as 2  MB, the text recognition accuracy is quite impressive and there are no  limits on the number of files that you can process in a day. However,  Google Docs won\u2019t retain the original formatting of the document and the  OCR engine almost fails with low-resolution images.<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. <\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/finereader.abbyyonline.com\/en\/Account\/Welcome\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Abbyy FineReader<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 FineReader Online is a web-based OCR service that can instantly  convert your PDF files and images into corresponding office file  formats. This is an Abbyy service and therefore the character  recognition accuracy is quite good.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike the OCR engine in Google Docs that can only recognize printed  text written Latin characters, FineReader can understand a much wider  variety of languages. It even works with multilingual documents that  have text written multiple languages.<\/p>\n<p>A free account at FineReader Online will only let you convert a  handful of images to text and you\u2019ll have to shell out around $3 per 10  pages for additional conversions.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3. <\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.onlineocr.net\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>OnlineOCR.net<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Online OCR, as the name suggests, is a cloud based OCR service that  can handle all common images formats including scanned PDFs. If you have  multiple images that you would like to convert to text in one go, you  can put them all in a single zip file and upload it to Online OCR.<\/p>\n<p>Of all the OCR services that I have tried so far, Online OCR has  impressed me the most. The character recognition accuracy is quite good  and the converted documents look like a replica of the original images.  In my limited test with three different types of images, Online OCR was  able to preserve the structure and formatting after the conversion in  all the three case.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/img.labnol.org\/di\/online_OCR.png\" alt=\"online OCR\" width=\"540\" height=\"200\" title=\"\"><\/p>\n<p>Like FineReader, Online OCR offers credits for converting around 5-6\u00a0  images to text for free and after the limit is over, you\u2019ll have to pay  around $4 per 50 pages.<\/p>\n<p><strong>4. <\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.free-ocr.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>FreeOCR.com<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 If you ever need to extract plain text from an image or a scanned PDF  file, Free OCR may be worth a try. The service requires no registration  and you can handle up to 10 image uploads per hour.<\/p>\n<p>Free OCR is like a graphical front-end for Google\u2019s Tesseract OCR  engine that is often considered as one of the most accurate text  recognition engines around. However, Tesseract supports only a limited  number of languages and it ignores most of the formatting of the scanned  image.<\/p>\n<p><strong>5. <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ocrterminal.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>OCR Terminal<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 OCR Terminal is one of the most mature online OCR services out there  that not only supports images and scanned PDFs but even software  screenshots.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, if you ever get an error message on your computer,  capture a screenshot, upload the image to OCR terminal and it will  return you the entire error in plain text that you can copy-paste in  emails or online forums.<\/p>\n<p>OCR Terminal is internally powered by Abbyy\u2019s OCR engine. A free  account with OCR Terminal gets you 20 free conversions every month and  you can pay around 7-9 \u00a2 per additional conversion.<\/p>\n<p><strong>6. <\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/ocronline.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>OCR Online<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Like FreeOCR, OCR Online doesn\u2019t require any registration and you can  translate up to 100 images to text in a single day. It also supports a  large number of languages.<\/p>\n<p>OCR Online offers good recognition accuracy and preserves most of the  original formatting but what you\u2019ll like most about this service is  batch processing. You can upload a large number of files in one batch  and it will output the results as one document.<\/p>\n<h2>Online OCR Software \u2013 A Comparison<\/h2>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/img.labnol.org\/di\/online_OCR_software.png\" alt=\"online OCR software\" width=\"540\" height=\"255\" title=\"\"><\/p>\n<p>[*] One obvious downside will all the above mentioned OCR software is  that they work only with printed text, they cannot recognize characters  from hand-written text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OCR software let you easily convert images, such as digital photographs, scanned documents, printed books, etc. into text. Once you perform OCR on an image, you\u2019ll be able to copy-paste or edit the text content of that image without any retyping and it also becomes more searchable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15,14],"tags":[727],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-softwares","category-tools","category-web-development","tag-softwares"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":470,"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.santoshkori.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}