Open Source OCR that makes searchable PDFs

Ed Valio — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:20:51 +0000

From Slashdot: ”In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn’t find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network.

Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface.”

Slashdot – Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs

Windows 7 search can now OCR TIFF images on its own

Ed Valio — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:28:09 +0000

From ARS Technica:

”The indexing service that powers Windows search can now perform OCR of TIFF images. Though not enabled by default (due to resource usage constraints), installing it gives full-text searching of TIFFs. Scanned documents and faxes are the main target for this capability.”

See the Microsoft TechNet page for installation info.

ARS Technica – Hasta la Vista, baby: Ars reviews Windows 7 (p.14 of 15)

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Open Source OCR that makes searchable PDFs

Windows 7 search can now OCR TIFF images on its own