The process of characters printed on paper is checked by electronic equipment to determine the shape or to detect and differentiate dark and light patterns, which is then translated into computer text with the help of character recognition is known as OCR. There are mainly two reasons why OCR is used; one is that it can store documents, and the other is the capability to reuse documents and their contents. Many companies utilize OCR software because of searching for documents to make the workflow easier to handle and streamlined.
During the earlier stages, OCR software was unreliable and was pretty difficult and rough to use. However, with the advent of computing power advancing rapidly, OCR has become the fastest and easiest way to convert text from an image. Students and teachers will also find great use of this software as they work on essays, articles, projects etc. In the case of teachers and professors, they can easily whip out the pdf files while teaching them.
FreeOCR (Windows 10)
It is a window based optical character recognition software and it’s useful for scanning from most scanners. It will provide you with all the core functionalities you will expect from such software. If you possess a TWAIN scanner, you will be able to directly scan and extract the text from the paper, including TIFF and PDF format which are multi-page documents. Its interface is a bit outdated; some words will not be converted properly, it’s pretty easy to use, has no size limitation and supports multiple languages.
Capture2Text
With its narrow yet useful function Capture2Text is an interesting little application. Since it’s a portable application, you don’t have to install it on your device. You can use it on any windows system by just running the executable. Since it’s open-source, you can easily copy and modify it as long as you follow the terms of the GNU license. It doesn’t possess any fancy features; however, if you need to quickly capture text from images you are handling, this application is your best choice. You should press the hotkey and select the portion of your screen you want to OCR, which is then transferred directly to the clipboard from a paste into a word processor. With rapid conversion and easy access, it’s definitely one of the best OCR tools.
Readiris
This tool will allow you to split and aggregate, edit and annotate, sign and protect your PDF files. This is especially useful for students, professors and teachers as it helps convert, edit and transform all your paper documents into different digital forms in a few clicks. The recovery of text from all sorts of files with perfect accuracy is possible with this optical character recognition engine. You can easily create, modify, sign and annotate PDF files; however, it cannot scan business cards.
LightPDF
It is an online service which helps you convert the images into texts in an accurate and efficient manner and manage the scanned PDF files into editable text formats. With the single click of the mouse, you can add files. You can choose more than one language like English, Japanese, Italian and French to recognize the text. There are two basic options for LightPDF: OCR VIP service and OCR Basic service; both functions will convert the image into text completely. You can scan files that are larger than 30 MB. This tool is also supported by phones, so you have easy access to this tool.
Conclusion
There are many OCR tools to help you convert images into printed text through electronic conversion. There are many OCR tools available for free but the above mentioned are some of the best free OCR tools available. To mention some other PDFMate PDF Converter, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, SimpleOCR, Ocr. Space and Nanonets. There are many advantages and disadvantages which come with each of these tools however you can find which one suits your needs the best and install it for future use. These tools are all efficient and quick to convert image to text and make your work simpler.
