whats the best OCR for mac

[Anarchy99]

whats the best ocr for mac? and are there any where it could recognize printed or handwritten notes as well as typed documents?

thanks

 

[iGary]

Most scanners come with OCR software of some sort ... Adobe Acrobat Pro includes it as well.

 

[hughvane]

Omnipage and ReadIris.

For handwriting recognition, see this: http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/302789-convert-handwriting-digital-text.html

 

[dolphin842]

DevonThink Office has built-in OCR... but then again that's only if you want a paperless office document manager to go with your OCR software. It's likely overkill, but if you're currently looking of a method to store all your OCR stuff, it might be work a look.

 

[puble]

Has anyone used FineReader for Mac? The latest version is named Express, I've read several reviews - pretty good But have you tested them?

 

[PeggyD]

I've been using PDF Pen 4 which uses the OmniPage engine & does a very good job.

 

[OCRpro]

I would recommend Readiris Pro 12 for all Mac users. Works great on most of my documents and sends the doc right to word, pages or text edit.

 

[monokakata]

Has anyone used FineReader for Mac? The latest version is named Express, I've read several reviews - pretty good But have you tested them?

I've used the Build 8.xxxxx version and it worked well, considering what I gave it -- more than 1,000 pages of typescript (typed 40+ years ago in a rainforest) scanned into PDFs with an Epson V300 Photo.

I was really surprised by how well it handled light/dark type (it may be that typewriters are so old-technology that not many people remember inked ribbons that made the characters lighter and lighter as they were used up).

Sure, it completely blew it here and there.

But it was way, way better than I had hoped for.

This was my workflow:

1. Scan the pages on the Epson, using Epson's software to make a PDF (I scanned 200 pages at a time)

2. Run FineReader on those PDFs to make searchable PDFs

If it can do a decent job on old beat-out typed pages, it can probably do pretty well given decent source material.

I haven't tried any of the others. Certainly they could be as good, or better.