OCR Scanner with LEADTOOLS SDK App Reviews

I’ve tried to extract text from several different sources with this app, all with varied results. Some good, some dreadful. The best required a fair amount of editing. The worst was totally unreadable jibberish. As others have written here, it has potential, but I’ll look for a more reliable OCR app for the time being.

Finally. I have been searching for an ocr app for the mac and this one works perfectly.

I had 90 pages of scanned PDFs to respond to in litigation Im involved with. Theyre court documents on complex forms. You have to submit paper copies to the court, paper copies to the other party, and retrieve paper copies from the court clerk if you need them. But theyre all stored electronically. Thats like planting a garden, emailing pictures to your friends, and then inviting them to share a harvest feast with you based on their printouts. This OCR software turns it back into at least the aroma of a fresh harvest. Granted, none of the formatting is retained and some of the lower case Ws are upper case (almost all of the ones at the beginning of a word), but if you need a scanned document to copy and paste from this free tool is priceless. There are weird bugs. The Open dialog never closes. The save dialog doesnt let you change the name of the document unless you click the [ ... ] button to browse file system for its destination. But none of that gets in the way of using this tool to brute force your way into a document you hate for not being textual.

For recognition of text it’s amazing. It rarely makes mistakes and is very fast. Maybe not the most elegant interface but especially for an OCR app that’s free it’s great. Import the result into Textwrangler to do regular expression fixing up of paragraphs, etc, if necessary.

Consistently crashes with larger number of pages, so plan on doing a small number of pages at a time. Quirky interface. Any way to export text back into a scanned PDF? I don’t know, not easy to figure out with this program. It does export text into a text file, somewhat accurately, if you want to do it a few pages at a time. Too many qualifications on this one to call it a good program. Needs work.

This app works ok-ish. On first use, using a very clear image of printed text, the text recognition was about 80% correct. You will definitely need to proofread the resulting text.

will not load my jp2 image that I scanned in with HP scan program or other windows scan

What can I say? It works. Yes, it crashed a couple of times. But in 10 minutes I had OCR’d a 32 page document…for free. You really can’t beat that.