You might even be able to get this all done during the apps free trials, if they dont put limitations on their OCR capabilities.Prev Next View All In this weeks tech-advice column at Lifehackerkeep your questions coming, folkswere helping out a reader who has way too many important papers that need to make a magical transition to the digital realm.
At least, that sounds a lot more exciting than Optical Character Recognition, which doesnt really roll off the tongue. Advertisement Lifehacker reader Phil writes: David, your columns are informative, helpful and well written. Thank you. Im copying (digitizing by scanning) a non-profits meeting minutes. Each set of minutes representing a meeting, usually just one or two typewritten pages, comprise a file. I will merge all the files of one years meetings into one year file, then merge 10 of those files into another, separate decade file. Could you recommend a free or low-cost decent desktop OCR program or any other method that would make the minutes searchable Id very much like to retain the formatting of the original minutes. Advertisement Thanks for the kind words, Phil Im happy to helpnot because of the flattery, but because your question is one that a lot of readers have probably thought about (myself included). I have a whole stack of things that Id love to move from the physical world to the digital world, so I can then Marie Ko ndo the original documents and photos into oblivion. Assuming youre creating PDFs, upload your file(s) to Google Drive. Right-click on any individual PDF, hover your mouse over Open With, and select Google Docs. Google will then attempt to run some OCR on your PDF, and you should be able to save the resulting file as a document. You can then search through this document (and any others you convert) via Drive itself. GO Media may get a commission 10 off Your First Bag of Coffee 4 The more I think about it, though, that solution seems a little inelegant given how many files you have to work with. Make Searchable Software Like TesseractStudioInstead, I might try a piece of software like TesseractStudio.Net or just Tesseract OCR, if you dont fear the command line. You should be able to use this to create OCR data from your files, and you can then search for them directly via Windows or macOS. OCRmyPDF is another option thats similar to Tesseract OCR, but, again, youll be playing with typed commands to apply OCR to your files. Screenshot: Paperwork Advertisement Theres also Paperwork, an open-source document cataloging tool that comes with OCR built right in, which I would definitely consider given that its designed to be an all-in-one piece of software for archiving, sorting, and searching documents. I havent used PDF-XChange Viewer, but others have recommended it as an option. The free version will drop watermarks into your PDFs, but it can create PDFs from images and, if Im correct, add OCR to these and any existing PDFs you have. Its worth exploring, even if its not the ideal (free) solution. Similarly, FreeOCR can take your images or PDFs, apply OCR, and export the results as plain text files or Word documents. ![]() Advertisement 27 Free Alternatives to Adobes Expensive App Subscriptions Adobe appears to have upset a number of users with another price increase for its app Read more As for paid solutions, theres always Adobe Acrobat Pro or Foxit PhantomPDF. Both will allow you to add OCR to PDFs, and you should be able to process all of your documents as a big batch (or create a script that does this with a folders worth of contents).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |