OCR choices

July 10, 2007 9:32 AM

What's out there as far as affordable OCR software? Are there any good SourceForge choices? I don't use OCR enough to justify paying the typical $150 prices I keep running across. I'd be fine with something that just OCRs a pre-existing file (like a TIFF) or runs on the command line (Windows).
posted by stam_broker to computers & internet (10 answers total)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openocr/
It's free but I'm not impressed by its quality. I tried it on handwritten, though. so give it a shot.
posted by PowerCat at 10:20 AM on July 10, 2007

Wrong link :P
http://www.simpleocr.com/
posted by PowerCat at 10:20 AM on July 10, 2007

The current top pick is Tesseract, which is backed by Google.
posted by tmcw at 10:34 AM on July 10, 2007

on google code...
posted by tmcw at 10:34 AM on July 10, 2007

You don't want Tesseract, you want OCRopus (also a Google-backed project) which combines Tesseract with a layout analyzer and a language model.
posted by rajbot at 10:42 AM on July 10, 2007

Just about any scanner or multi-function printer you buy with a scanner will include free OCR software.
posted by JackFlash at 11:49 AM on July 10, 2007

Another, i've never tried, is GOCR
posted by miniape at 11:50 AM on July 10, 2007

If you have the latest version of MS One Note on your computer, it does a good job.
posted by svenx at 12:20 PM on July 10, 2007

The original poster mentioned windows, while the information on OCRopus says it's only being developed and tested for Ubuntu until 2008.

Disappointing, since I found this by looking for OCR software--I wonder what the original poster ended up using.
posted by digitalis at 8:46 PM on August 17, 2007

digitalis: The project I'm doing is low priority so I ended up using nothing, though I may give SimpleOCR a try.
posted by stam_broker at 1:04 PM on September 9, 2007