Tuesday, November 11, 2008

OCR Terminal - Free, Online OCR Scanning

Thanks to blogger Sarab who commented on my erroneous article for Qipit, we now know that there is a true, online OCR scanning service available…

OCR Trminal
OCR Terminal is a free online Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service that allows you to convert scanned images and PDF documents into editable and searchable text documents. It accurately preserves formatting and layout of documents. It was built to provide the user with a free and easy way of performing OCR without having to install new software or having to pay for it. Automatic layout extraction and segmentation of image areas ensure that the page layout and formatting of the document is preserved accurately.

OCR Terminal supports all popular document image formats including PDF and multi-page TIFF captured as scanned images, photographs, or even screenshots. Extracted text can be downloaded in TXT, DOC, XML or RTF formats or directly e-mailed with a thumbnail of the uploaded image.

The site currently allows for text extraction only from English language documents, but they are working on extending this functionality across other languages as well. They are also currently working on a desktop client that will allow users to upload the document by dragging and dropping all the TIFF and PDF files into the client and get back perfectly formatted Word files.

5 comments:

Sarab said...

Blogger Sarab is happy that you had a chance to review OCR Terminal and found it useful!

stanccia said...

A comparative site is good ocr, which only supports English now.

stanccia said...

Online OCR services are cool. And there are some alternatives like: freeocr.com, goodocr.com, etc.

Unknown said...

All of them give more or less the same quality but not the same visibility. I recently came across http://www.sciweavers.org/free-online-ocr, which provides a good balance between high accuracy and very clean user interface. The service does not imply any restrictions so far, no ads, 33+ langaues, multiple image formats.

Unknown said...

I find another free online ocr to convert image to text, it supports 40+ languages, and can save converted text to editable txt file and searchable pdf document.