OCR Software

Any suggestions about good OCR (optical character recognition) software free or at a reasonable price? They all seem to be fairly expensive.
Thanks

 

Hello Osaban,

Does your scanner have an OCR engine? My Visioneer scanner uses the TextBridge OCR, and I've found it to be adequate. I can import directly into MSWord, or other text editor.

I've heard about this free one, but have no experience with it:

http://www.simpleocr.com/

EDIT: Not all OCR engines are created alike. I was reminded of this as I perused the above site. See here for a good description of differences:

http://www.simpleocr.com/OCR_Software_Guide.asp

I haven't kept up with OCRs for several years, but in the past, OmniPage Pro gave the most accurate renderings of tables, columns, etc. We used it at the college where I worked. Of course, it's expensive.

Depending on what your needs are - evaluating different ones using demo downloads might help in finding what you want.

----
rich

 

I use abbyy finereader 9. Very effective for me.

 

Thank you both for your suggestions. I have an old hp scanjet scanner which is supposed to have a rudimentary OCR program, but it really doesn't work or there might be something wrong with my settings.

Given the prices of OCR programs (100-300 $) it might be an idea to buy a new scanner with its dedicated OCR program, so I'm pondering at the moment which solution would be the best.

 

I've actually found an interesting link:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/ar...0_-You-may-already-have-it_2E002E002E00_.aspx

Within Office XP and upgraded versions there is an application called 'Microsoft Office Document Imaging' which is basically an OCR incorporated into Office XP, it works almost perfectly and creates word documents.

 

Abbyy has always given me the best results. You might find a version of Abbyy v8 around for cheap.