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chabig · Oct 6, 2006, 06:44 PM

GraphicConverter ($30) includes OCR.

Chris

ghporter · Oct 6, 2006, 07:20 PM

I'm looking for an OCR app. I have scans of a bunch of reading material, and I need to be able to clean them up. The problem is that the scans are just PICTURES of the pages (in Word documents). So I need to somehow recognize the text in the pictures in these documents. I have figured that I can paste the pictures into PowerPoint then save the "presentation" as a TIFF file (yes, I AM stumbling around here), but I still need some sort of app to take the TIFF and convert it into text. Any sort of help would be teriffic!

dimmer · Oct 6, 2006, 07:30 PM

Oi, I can't find anything, much less anything free. I have a copy of OmniPage you can have (but it's an OS 9 app, I have no idea if it'll work in classic.) IM if you want the disk/image. I guess Omni gave up on the Mac, which seems rather silly.

dimmer · Oct 6, 2006, 07:33 PM

Hmm, not free, but universal. Readiris Pro 11 for Mac OCR software

ghporter · Oct 6, 2006, 09:31 PM

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. I think for this project I'll go back to my PC-MS Office for Windows included "Microsoft Document Imaging" and "Microsoft Document Scaning," both of which work a scanner and take TIFF files as input. And "Imaging" does a decent job of OCR. Of course Office 2004 for Mac doesn't do either one of those things-there doesn't seem to be native scanning support in OS X at all that I can find...

Mithras · Oct 7, 2006, 10:57 AM

Adobe Acrobat Pro is very not free but does excellent OCR.

headbirth · Oct 8, 2006, 08:20 AM

There are a number of X11 opensource projects ... check SourceForge.

RevEvs · Oct 8, 2006, 05:17 PM

A free, but not brilliant one is GOCR. Its opensource, look for it on SourceForge. I started making a OS X frontend for it a few yrs back, but never finished.

ghporter · Oct 8, 2006, 08:29 PM

I'm sort of new to the whole x11 thing And a lack of a GUI front end would definitely slow me down. I guess I need more hand-holding than I thought-or I need to just get the pages recognized by on my Windows machine and then do the correction (most of the pages are less than perfect pictures of less than perfect originals) on my MBP...

headbirth · Oct 9, 2006, 12:32 PM

X11 doesn't mean no GUI.

Uncle Skeleton · Oct 10, 2006, 12:44 AM

Originally Posted by chabig

GraphicConverter ($30) includes OCR.

Chris

Um...can you elaborate?

dru · Oct 10, 2006, 01:24 AM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. I think for this project I'll go back to my PC-MS Office for Windows included "Microsoft Document Imaging" and "Microsoft Document Scaning," both of which work a scanner and take TIFF files as input. And "Imaging" does a decent job of OCR. Of course Office 2004 for Mac doesn't do either one of those things-there doesn't seem to be native scanning support in OS X at all that I can find...

Have you tried "Image Capture" in your Applications folder? It seems to support scanning (although not my scanner which is Windows-only, I scan via VPC).