Questions tagged [ocr]

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of converting images of text to text that can be manipulated by word processors etc.

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How to extract text with OCR from a PDF on Linux?

How do I extract text from a PDF that wasn't built with an index? It's all text, but I can't search or select anything. I'm running Kubuntu, and Okular doesn't have this feature.
agentofuser's user avatar
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36 votes
4 answers
17k views

How to create PDF with scanned pages but selectable text?

Today I recieved a PDF from our supplier and it contained several printed and scanned pages with signatures etc. I opened it in Acrobat Reader DC. But to my surprise the text from the evidently ...
Vojtěch Dohnal's user avatar
24 votes
6 answers
22k views

Batch-OCR many PDFs

This has been discussed a year ago here: Batch OCR for many PDF files (not already OCRed)? Is there any way to batch OCR PDFs that haven't been already OCRed? This is, I think, the current state of ...
Joe's user avatar
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23 votes
3 answers
18k views

Blurry text in PDF

I have a pdf that has blurry text. The text itself is readable but causes lots of strain. This is an example of the text. Is there a way to clear it up?
user1255895's user avatar
21 votes
11 answers
52k views

How to remove OCR from a PDF?

I have been searching Google for some time but cannot find an answer to my question. I have unwanted layers of OCR in a document that I recently scanned with Adobe Acrobat. It has not been OCRed ...
Sanoo's user avatar
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19 votes
8 answers
38k views

How can I convert scanned images as PDF to a searchable PDF file? [closed]

I have a PDF of a scanned book. I'm looking for a free software that will perform OCR and then provide an option to save it as a PDF or document again. Is there one?
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16 votes
3 answers
47k views

How can I identify fonts from an image? [closed]

Many times I come across bitmaps with nothing but text paragraphs, so I was looking for a way to identify the font used, the paragraph alignment, line spacing and color, bold, italics. Would an OCR ...
Robin Rodricks's user avatar
13 votes
6 answers
18k views

Extract OCR text from Evernote

Evernote does OCR on the images you save to it. Is there a way to get the full text equivalent for an image in Evernote, or is the OCR only for searching?
Leigh Riffel's user avatar
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13 votes
8 answers
20k views

Enable OCR in Greenshot

I run Windows 10 with Microsoft Office professional Plus 2016 on my computer. Looks like MS OCR functionality is enabled in my system since OneNote is able to copy text from image. But how to enable ...
vico's user avatar
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13 votes
8 answers
16k views

Practical OCR solution for converting a large book to a digital format?

I was over by my grandparent's place this past weekend. My grandmother pulled out this giant (~1400 page) book of her family history going back to 1630 or so. Giant nerd that I am, I thought it would ...
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11 votes
5 answers
7k views

PDF has an extra blank in all words after running through Ghostscript

This PDF was produced by Abbyy Finereader 10: http://ebooks.zeitr.org/from_abbyy.pdf You can copy & paste the first sentence and get this (very good) text result: Der »Bund Deutscher ...
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11 votes
1 answer
7k views

How to analyze the space usage within pdf document?

I have this 7mb pdf that I made from 65 scanned B/W images. After OCR, the document becomes 32mb. I have never seen text taking up so much space. (in theory 25mb should give me 25 million letters ...
ufotds's user avatar
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10 votes
4 answers
40k views

Batch OCR for many PDF files (not already OCRed)? [closed]

I use Google Desktop Search (I am on Vista) and not all my PDF files are recognized in my archive folder. It is normal as "PDF files that contain scanned images" are not indexed ( http://desktop....
Erb's user avatar
  • 405
10 votes
3 answers
7k views

Good free OCR with GUI for correcting mistakes? (for Windows)

I've used SimpleOCR, which has a nice GUI for correcting mistakes. Unfortunately it makes a lot of mistakes! (and suffers other bugs and limitations) On the other hand Tesseract is more accurate but ...
Hugh Allen's user avatar
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9 votes
3 answers
5k views

Can Acrobat 11 be made to do OCR using multiple CPU cores?

OCR processing takes time. Using multiple CPU cores would speed up processing. Acrobat 10 was not a multithreaded application. How about Acrobat 11? Does 11 by default do OCR using multiple CPU cores (...
tarcman.'s user avatar
  • 151
8 votes
3 answers
170k views

How do I Initiate an OCR scan in Microsoft Office Word 2010?

How do you kick off a scan and character recognition using Microsoft Office Word 2010 (Beta)? I can't seem to find an option to scan the document in my scanner directly into a 2010 Word document. I ...
grenade's user avatar
  • 547
8 votes
4 answers
11k views

Is there a utility to do OCR on images on the windows clipboard? [closed]

Sometimes, I find myself typing out a lot of text from a screen capture. Its quite tedious. Is there an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program out there that would allow me to quickly convert ...
Contango's user avatar
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7 votes
3 answers
23k views

OCR Tesseract, Empty page error?

I compiled it from sources with leptonica. This is a png image with transparent background, which I edited adding a blue color and still this error: Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine v3.02.02 with ...
Jim's user avatar
  • 71
7 votes
7 answers
5k views

Extracting text from a .PDF scanned book [closed]

I have a scanned a book in PDF format, but the quality is rather poor: (The language is Romanian and it's a medical physiology book, in case you were wondering) I want to extract text from the book (...
ChristianM's user avatar
7 votes
3 answers
5k views

OCR for numbers with gray noisy background

I tried to run OCR on multiple scanned sheets with numbers like this image (All with same background, digits only): But all trials failed! I tried offline OCRs: gocr, tesseract and couple of online ...
ItsMe's user avatar
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7 votes
2 answers
23k views

Understanding OCR options in Adobe Acrobat: "Searchable Image", "Searchable Image (Exact)", and "Editable Text and Images"

In Adobe Acrobat (I'm using Pro DC if that matters), there are three options for OCR: "Searchable Image". "Searchable Image (Exact)". "Editable Text and Images". What are the differences between ...
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7 votes
2 answers
921 views

How to leave pdf image unchanged while adding OCR to a pdf with pdfsandwich?

I am trying to add OCR to PDFs and am using pdfsandwich to do so. The problem is that pdfsandwich processes the image when doing OCR which changes what the document looks like. Is there any way to ...
user3750888's user avatar
6 votes
1 answer
438 views

Can a OCR confuse letter case?

Can a OCR sometimes confuse between letter case? For example 't' interpreted as 'T' or 'r' as 'R' at some point?
user754221's user avatar
6 votes
4 answers
1k views

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

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?
Moshe's user avatar
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6 votes
3 answers
100k views

How to recover pixelated text from JPEG image with Photoshop?

I've got a JPEG image with text on it (badly scanned document), which is hardly readable. I have already played around with the sharpen filters, contrast, levels and the color replacement tool, with ...
user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
5k views

How to replaces images of text in PDFs with formatted text using OCR

I get a lot of PDFs from other people consisting of scanned old documents. Unfortunately, sometimes the text on the scans, though legible, looks grainy and is hard to read. What I've been able to do ...
tel's user avatar
  • 177
6 votes
3 answers
5k views

How to do OCR on a PDF document? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How to extract text with OCR from a PDF on Linux? I have a few documents in English and Hebrew that I scanned in and converted to PDF format. Is there some free or cheap ...
6 votes
1 answer
4k views

OCR Image recognition plugin for firefox and chrome? [closed]

Sometimes i need to OCR images that I stumble upon on some webpages. I would like to know if there are any plugins for Firefox and Chrome that would allow me to upload desired image for processing on ...
Boris_yo's user avatar
  • 5,864
5 votes
3 answers
24k views

Command-line OCR in Windows 7

What are some command-line OCR utilities that will work in Windows 7 64-bit?
Phenom's user avatar
  • 6,647
5 votes
5 answers
20k views

What is this symbol `¬` and how to remove it from an MS Word 2013 file?

I used a OCR program to convert some scanned pages to an ms word file. After the conversion is possible to found the symbol ¬ in the middle of many words. I tried to search and replace it but word is ...
karnal's user avatar
  • 51
5 votes
2 answers
9k views

OCR with non-language text

I am interested in using OCR to recognize text from a document that doesn't contain words. Rather, it is a document with a long string of "random" printed characters. I have been trying to use ...
Daniel's user avatar
  • 161
5 votes
1 answer
10k views

In Onenote, how do I 'make text in image searchable' enabled by default?

OneNote has a great OCR feature where you can select an image and click make text in image searchable. But I'd like this enabled by default for all images I paste into OneNote - is this possible? (...
falter's user avatar
  • 2,099
5 votes
1 answer
2k views

Is there a better way to correct errors in Adobe Acrobat's OCR results?

I'm using OCR Text Recognition integrated into Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 to produce an (invisible) searchable text overlay for text pages I have scanned. This is very neat for copying some phrases to the ...
Jonas Heidelberg's user avatar
5 votes
0 answers
351 views

Can I tinker with the encoding when using pdftotext to convert PDF to text?

Sometimes when I do pdftotext it results in perfect text. I assume this is because the actual unicode text data is embedded directly in the PDF itself, and simply read out. But other times (around ...
Lance's user avatar
  • 377
5 votes
0 answers
2k views

How to compress Tesseract-encoded PDFs while maintaining embedded text from OCR?

I've been experimenting with using Tesseract to OCR my PDFs, and it has been mostly successful, particularly with German Fraktur texts (the old style gothic print), which tools like Adobe Acrobat can'...
Jason's user avatar
  • 315
4 votes
4 answers
6k views

Copy pdf text layer to another pdf

Suppose you've got 2 "scanned" pdf files. Large, but without text layer. Smaller (with lower quality images), but with correct text layer. Both files contain equal images, different only by their ...
i3v's user avatar
  • 1,580
4 votes
2 answers
21k views

Online OCR website for processing an entire pdf file at one time? [closed]

I am looking for an online OCR website for processing a multi-page pdf file at one time. Free preferably. I know http://www.newocr.com/. If I am correct, it can only OCR one page at a time, by ...
Tim's user avatar
  • 17.3k
4 votes
2 answers
1k views

Image to Text converter [closed]

I need a software which can convert scanned text to editable text. I will prefer freeware?
Mr-Right's user avatar
  • 595
4 votes
2 answers
4k views

How to automatically find non-searchable PDFs

Suppose I have a directory full of many PDFs. In most of them, the text is completely search-able, which is the way I need them to be. But a few of them are just image scans, and they need to be OCR-...
Brian Z's user avatar
  • 1,130
4 votes
2 answers
8k views

When running Adobe Acrobat's OCR on a PDF document, which downsampling produces a higher quality: 600 dpi or 72 dpi?

I have a large PDF document that consists of scanned pages of a textbook. I want to run Adobe Acrobat 9's text recognition function on it, but I'm presented with this menu when I do. I'm confused by ...
Ricardo Altamirano's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
1k views

How to create documents from scanned images

I have a large number of Micorsoft Word documents to create, after a disk crash and patchy backups, destroyed the originals. We have a fair amount of the originals left, and instead of manually ...
scope_creep's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
1k views

Replace (OCR) garbled text in PDF?

Now and then I come across a PDF which looks fine in first place but the underlying text is garbled. Currently I have a PDF where only the headings are garbled and I would like to know if it's ...
TheLostOne's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
924 views

How to add OCRed text to original pdf in gscan2pdf?

I am new to gscan2pdf 0.9.31, and just used it to OCR a scanned pdf. After saving the pdf, the OCRed text is stored on the top left corner. However I wish each OCRed character to be added to ...
Tim's user avatar
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3 votes
3 answers
3k views

How to effectively scan 130,000 paper pages in 10 days

I have a rather large project which will ultimately benefit society, and I'm looking for all the help I can muster.   I have about 130,000 pages that need to be digitized. Many of them are in packages ...
Gryph's user avatar
  • 388
3 votes
2 answers
366 views

Optimal lossy compression of images

I have a lot of images/documents, where I want quite a low filesize, without throwing away to much information, or cause generation loss with future compression. A) Documents, business cards etc ...
Olav's user avatar
  • 684
3 votes
3 answers
29k views

What software can convert handwriting to text?

I took a look at MyScript, but the program does not accept PDF format. I have a few documents (PDF) that are scans of hand writing. I need a program that can take the PDF scan it, use OCR and ...
Gerrit Wessels's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
2k views

How to extract Unicode character from .png file?

I want to extract Unicode character from .jpg and .png files. I try to do it by using following command: tesseract 1.png output.txt That command works for English characters but when I try it for ...
Madhav Nikam's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
1k views

Editing searchable .pdf OCR

My case is quite specific so I'll try to explain it quickly and precisely. I have to digitalize several old paper sheets of 230mm x 268mm (~ 9" x 27,7") folded in 4 parts; you can find a quick drawn ...
Gruber's user avatar
  • 449
3 votes
3 answers
3k views

Batch convert pdf's t searchable pdf's

I'm looking for a way to convert thousands of pdf's to searchable pdf's. I've used a program called "PDF Create Assistant" that came with Nuance's ecopy software. However, you can't select a folder, ...
boilers222's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
36k views

OCR in Word 2013

Word 2013 can naively open and edit PDF documents (big plus in my opinion). Is there a way to get it do some OCR as well? On a PDF that that had mostly pictures, even the parts that were pure text ...
soandos's user avatar
  • 24.4k