Is there Any OCR program that can handle non-Latin characters?

Question

I'm looking for an OCR program that can work with hebrew characters. I'm open to using something on Mac or PC, but it needs to be a reliable program.

What are my options?

Answer 1

Abbyy Fine Reader is a very powerful OCR program that can work with Hebrew characters.

ABBYY FineReader 10 is a comprehensive OCR software for creating editable and searchable files from scanned documents, PDFs and digital camera images.

ABBYY continues to lead in the OCR language support. With FineReader 10, users can process documents in 186 languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hebrew, Armenian, Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin. FineReader 10 also reads scripting languages and simple chemical formulas. The text recognition software includes dictionaries with spell-checking capabilities for 39 languages allowing verification of recognized text directly in the FineReader Editor.

Answer 2

There is an opensource project named hocr aimed to provide free Hebrew OCR. It might be what you are looking to. http://hocr.berlios.de/

Answer 3

Depends on the language -- in my case, Japanese. If you have Microsoft Office 2007(and newer probably), you can add language packs (sometimes costs ~$30?) and use the Microsoft Document Imaging feature. Microsoft appears to have Hebrew available as well.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/language/

However, I couldn't get it do anything other then crash, so I used SmartOCR Lite, which worked beautifully for Japanese. I'm not sure if the SmartOCR I used is the same as the one Stella used, though.