I’ve got a lot of books I need to read and make notes from for a PGCE course, someone on my course said you can use OCR to convert scanned images to text, my printer has OCR but when I try to change it to text MS Office says I need to install something from my CD, can I find my CD, no, so I’ve been trying to find something else I can use to scan and convert PDF’s but not having much luck. Any recommendations? Thought this would save me time having to type out something of relevance in the books I’m reading but so far I’ve wasted lots of time trying to get something that will work. I have Foxit reader which works well with text PDF but not scanned images from books. Any help appreciated!

You could try googling “free OCR”

Heehee.

Have used this a fair bit at school. Not perfect but pretty good as long as your images/scans are well defined and contrasty.

http://download.cnet.com/FreeOCR/3000-10743_4-10717191.html

slainte 😀 rob

Thanks, I’ll try that one, I did google free OCR and tried some but they didn’t work well or weren’t very user friendly (more like me being a bit of a numpty with this sort of software) and one changed all my browser settings, set my homepage to Ask.com?? So looking for reccomendations 😆

😀

Perfect, just tried that software, no problems, another one I tried, with the same scanned text, came up with lots of gobbledegook.

Can you do it with a smartphone app, I think Google Goggles and Google Docs are meant to do it just by pointing your camera at the page.

If you have microsoft office (pre 2010) you have free OCR software under Microsoft Office Document Imaging.

If you cant see it goto Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, select Microsoft Office and click on Change and then select add features. You will find Office Imaging under Tools.

Edit must be pre 2007. Its shown as unavailable on office 2007

Yeah, there is a smartphone app but I’ve still got an old normal mobile phone.

I have got the office imaging tools, I’ve got Office 2003, but when I try to run it it says I need to install something from the original CD which I can’t find at the mo, so it won’t work, but that FreeOCR link a few posts up works a treat, converted perfectly, and then saved as a .doc