OCR software so that I can use my camera as a scanner

We just use Adobe Acrobat. Seems to work ok. We scan documents on our color copier which saves them as PDF's. I open that PDF in Acrobat and run OCR on it. Then I copy the text into InDesign (or Word or whatever you want) and format and fix the errors.

I experimented with using camera images and OCR. Mixed results, but original documents were not that good to begin with.

You'd need Acrobat Pro for OCR. It does a good job. It also does all kinds of useful things with PDFs. Stand alone is pricey unless you get a student/teacher discount ~$120. I get it as part of a Creative Suite package.

ABBYY FineReader Express is also quite good. Pretty simple interface and it only does OCR $99, but search for a coupon and you can take $20 off that.

ReadIris Pro is much more configurable than the others, but I don't think it is quite as accurate--though it is good. $129, but they sent me this link for $70 off.

http://link2.irislink.com/u.d?SYGtukTbzlytiOfZxLyN=491

VelOCRaptor has a free download and costs $29. By their own admission, it is acceptable for occasional use with good images.

There are others, but I haven't worked them.

macgrl said:

Thanks for your reply. Is that the pro version of adobe? Or the regular free one? I don't have the pro one

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Like Steve said, it's the Pro version that has OCR built in. I think we got ours with the Creative Suite as well or you can buy it alone.

macgrl said:

I can get the student discount for adobe so that is good, are there any other applications or is this the best for the money

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Download acrobat and give it a test run for 30 days and see if it does what you like. Do you have use for the other things that it can do? If so, go for it. If you simply want OCR you can save a few $$ by buying the others.

If you have use for Photoshop or some other Adobe apps, you might consider a bundle, but now we are talking about more money.

There are other apps. OmniPage comes to mind. It is very expensive. I used it about 15 years ago, so I really can't give you an accurate review of its current capabilities. I wasn't happy then, but I probably wouldn't have been happy with the alternatives back then either.

Here is a list of OCR software on the Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optical_character_recognition_software

Almost OCR

If you use NeatReceipts (Neat), when it pulls in documents and receipts, it automatically does an OCR on them, then saves them as a PDF (in the neat receipts library). Since it does an ocr on everything, the PDF it saves now has been OCR'd. You can open any of the PDFs and do a copy and paste from them into your favorite text processor.

BTW, the names of the files are not self evident, and you have to right click on the library and select "show Package" to be able to see the files.

But, if you have Neat, this is an moderately acceptable way to do quick and dirty OCR extractions.

I use my camera (iPhone or iPad) or scanner to get the picture of my doc, then import it into Neat. Works well for most things.