PDF OCR X Community Edition App Reviews

Work beautifully, the best OCR for Mac, so far I have tested. I was testing with simplified Chinese and it work the first time, beside it,s free. About 98% accurate, compare with other paid software. Some paid software are not at all working. Thanks

It’s pretty good given the price. Of course, to be truly useful, one would need to pay up for the enterprise version to process more than 1 page at a time. Some suggestions: 1) the OCR tends to miss some bold faced characters consistently - I tested on several different pages with the word “Annual” in bold and they all did not show up in the text output. In another example, a few intances of bold faced acronym “ECB” did not show up. 2) it would be be nice if the searchable pdf will highlight all instances of a particular word. Not sure if this is Preview’s problem of this app’s but in one occasion only the first “lifecycle” showed up in the search when there are 2 others on the page despite the text output has all 3 words 3) text oriented sideways (say a landscape page of text rotated left to show up as portrait) do not get recognized at all - this would be useful. I know, in a single page situation I could have rotated it first but in real life if I were to ocr many pages that becomes a bother 4) chinese (traditional) ocr can be improved - although the tests I threw at this app were more challenging because they were jpegs of newspaper clippings. Even then, it would really be nice if it can work better than the ~30% hit rate I observed

The initial problem I had with poor character recognition (I usually scan photocopies) was largely solved by increasing the resolution of the scans.

This is something like beta release software. I downloaded it to OCR a document that is in Azeri language (the language of Azerbaijan). At first glance it seemed to work quite well. However, on closer inspection I realized that it was not recognizing the letter “Ə” (upsidedown “e”) in the Azeri alphabet. None of these letters were recognized properly and instead the software recognized them as “e” from the latin alphabet. To me this shows that there are significant bugs in this software and it is not ready for official release.

It is not free as shown on the App Store. You need to pay for enterprise edition to convert multiple documents. Working on just a one page document is not very useful.

Takes a pdf photo of printed words and turns it into editable text.

I don’t often need OCR, so I gave this free version a try. Unfortunately, it simply does not work. My source was a very clearly scanned single page PDF image of a table with names and ages. Converting it to txt resulted in garbage, with not a single word from the file recognisable. The searchable PDF I tried next was also not searchable. Bottom line - stay away from this one.

Funny to see the way the app coverts your file showing for a split second taxt on an output page, whoch quicly vanishes leaving a blank result. Nice try, but no result. Waste of time.

Great App, easy to use and does what it says very nicely. Congrats.

All I wanted is to scan a page or a document and convert it to text and it does just that, its simple, quick and so easy…and its free. I am very happy with it.

I had a document in a typewriter face that two other OCR scanning applications wouldnt even touch. PDF OCR Community Edition scanned it fairly quickly and with very few errors. Im impressed!

I had an application that had a list of data that I needed to get converted to text. The app didnt have any way to export it and nothing was selectable on the screen. So I scrolled the screen and took screen shots, only about 10 of them, no big deal. I then cropped out everything except for the text. Should be a VERY easy conversion since it is nice and crips with absolutely no garbage in the image. I was able to achieve about 50% accuracy. This is pitiful. I found another application that was able to do a 98% conversion. I was quite disappointed with the application.

Not perfect, but quite good and did what I needed. Cant beat the price for quick OCR jobs.

For a free OCR did a great job. Be sure to read the description about this APP as this free version will only do the first page of multipage PDF files, the paid version for multi-page support is $29.99. To get my multiple page document I had to save each page as a single page PDF in Photoshop first. OK if you only do OCR on documents every once in a while… if you are doing this every day with multipage documents I would pay for an OCR. Recognized everything perfectly with just a few errors (rn was recognized as a m) that Im not sure any OCR would have caught.

I have an occassional need for extracting small snippets of text from various sources, for "fair use" applications. Even though it sounds like this is intended for PDFs, the application worked well using tiff images. Worked smoothly, easily---just dragged the image to the drop box, and out popped a usable OCR text. Had a few misses in terms of text recognition (two or three out of a page worth of text. But the source document was relatively recent, with decent image quality. Not sure how well it would do with something from the 19th century.

I use it to get code samples from eBooks. It does a good job of recognizing the text. My only complaint is line indentation is lost.

While the free version can convert one page at a time at most, if you, like me, need the ocr feature only for small passages/single pages, that limitation ceases to be a deal-breaker. The OCR capabilities are decent, with usually about 3 mistakes per paragraph, the usual OCR mistakes like n instead of o, etc. It is easy to correct those after the conversion, in the converted text field. The program recognizes and converts image files like jpg, png etc., and PDF files without problems.

I used this to scan 4 pages of a lease agreement, to create a modified version. Of nearly four full pages of text, there were only but 4 or 5 mistakes. For a free app it is well worth it; however I havent tested using any poor quality scans. Im sure that scanning faxed documents would present more of a challenge since they usually have a lot of "noise" and blotchy text.

I have a .pdf document where there is lots of very legible text embedded in images in the document. Unfortunately this app wont extract any of that. I conclude it is a text-extraction utility rather than an OCR utility, despite the claims of the seller. Ah well, its free.

Ive scanned about 30 pages so far and only had to tweak a few misread letters. At my workplace we have some expensive software that is supposed to do this, but it doesnt work as well as this app.