For those who do not know it, OCR is an acronym for Optical Character Recognition. OCR Software is quite common and most website users see OCR in action every time they visit a Web page and have to enter numbers or letters, into a box before proceeding. Even the Postal Service uses OCR software to scan and sort out its mail. The most popular form of OCR software today will convert images to text or convert scanned docs to text. The application of OCR is endless. For that reason, many businesses need to know what the best OCR tools for are converting images to text. So below is a list of the most effective OCR tools available today.
Google Docs - Google has a web based OCR feature that comes free when you sign up for Google Docs in their cloud. Google admits it has some limitations but is powerful enough to serve the occasional OCR needs. The tool can analyze a variety of image files which are 10 MB or smaller. The pixel height should be 10 with high resolution. Nonetheless, this free tool is highly effective. With fast servers and immense storage capacity, this makes Google Docs the best OCR tool on our list.
OCR Image to Ascii Utility 1.0 – This is another FreeWare OCR tool. It will convert images to text or convert scanned docs to text without using all of your system resources. If you have larger images to convert, then this utility can analyze an entire page or you can manually specify what text or image zones you want to output. This is outstanding tool developed by the open source community but one of the drawbacks is you have to be an experienced computer user to use it.
OCR Image to Text Conversion Tool from File Innovations – This tool from File Innovations takes No. 3 spot in our best OCR software because developers can use the API to add capabilities and customize the software. While this may not be beneficial to the average user, they can look forward to finding a version of this tool to suit their specific needs. Out of the box, the regular version will convert in a seamless flawless manner making this a best OCR tool and editor’s choice.
OCR Xpress Standard – This is quite a feature rich OCR tool that will easily convert scanned docs to text. It features automatic image rotation and segmentation of documents in text elements. It also supports multiple text output and all the popular image formats including Microsoft are RTF files and Adobe PDF. You will convert images to text quite easily with this OCR tool but it is going to cost you around to $240. Power and ease of use makes this one of the best OCR software tools available and comes in at No. 4 spot.
OmniPage 17 from Nuance – It should be no surprise that OmniPage takes the No. 5 spot in the best OCR tools category when it comes to converting images to text. It is one of the best on the market at $149. This company also does voice recognition software and has a well-established reputation on the Internet. If you want reliability and the best OCR tool for the money then OmniPage is the one for you.
So there you have the top five tools for scanning and converting images to text. I hope this list has been helpful!
