requires very high resolution original to do mediocre OCR

First, ignore the reviewers that complained that this application only scans one page. It says that *in the description*. If you like the quality it produces on one page and youd like it to do multiple pages, then pay to upgrade to the professional or enterprise version.

I like very much that the application can output the results to a PDF that includes the OCRed text. I was using it only with PDF source documents, but after reading the reviews here, I tried using an image, made from a screen capture. It took a PNG file and produced a PDF with the text in it. Contrary to the other reviewers comments that it doesnt work well with screen captures or other images, I thought it worked fairly well. Depending on the text, it didnt recognize spaces and some formatting, but that could happen with any source document.

I found that it requires a very high resolution source document in order to produce just mediocre results. If the text is a little less than perfect, the quality drops off quickly. I used it to OCR some W-2 tax forms. The forms were made up of boxes that contain a label in small print and a value in larger print. The proximity of the two sizes of print were enough to really confuse the application. In many cases, it recognized only the small print and not the larger.

For the most part, this free application is at least worth what I paid for it: nothing. It might do a lot better if source documents were higher quality. I would need to do some experimentation to verify that, though. I rarely do OCR and not much of it, so this was good enough for now. If my needs change, I would have to evaluate this application more closely to decide whether to purchase the full application.

I forgot to mention, I wish the application would save the results file to the same folder as the original. As it is now, the user must specify a single output folder for all results.

Lance E Sloan about PDF OCR X Community Edition