Use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to convert PDF to editable Word documents automatically without retyping. Freeware, desktop applications and enterprise servers. Compare features or get live help from our experts.

Total Cost of Ownership of an OCR Software

What is TCO (total cost of ownership)?

Total Cost of Ownership

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting. (Wikipedia).

TCO is a popular concept when it comes to comparing Software. It allows you to estimate the cost of using the OCR software and plan your automation strategy according to your possible workload and budget over time.

There are several aspects that are too circumstantial to be able to include in general cost estimates, but there are some that we know for a fact, and we can combine them in a total cost of ownership for each OCR scenario and compare them to the possible solutions on the market.

Front-End Cost

The first and most obvious element is front-end cost. This is the price that will be presented with the product, and the marketing team will be pointing towards special offers and discounts to cut it down. It is an important factor, but it is far from everything you would need to take into account. And yet, even here, there are different options. Some of the OCR solutions will offer you the “pay and forget” option of making one payment right here, right now. However, lately, the annual cost or subscription model has become more and more popular, allowing customers to spread costs over time and OCR creators to organize a steady flow of income.

Cost of Support and Maintenance

The second element of the total cost of ownership would be the cost of support and maintenance. Theoretically, it is possible to avoid […]

OCR Guide

What is OCR?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret text on scanned images. When this technology is applied to automating business data entry processes it’s referred to as OCR Data Capture.

Many are familiar with popular desktop OCR applications designed to convert scanned images to editable documents. When this process is applied to specific areas of the document containing data fields it’s called zone OCR. But OCR data capture software is more than just simple zone OCR. Modern applications use some or all of these technologies:

80%

Using the OCR software enables enterprises to reduce the document processing time by as much as 80%

Benefits of using OCR

If not for the trees then do it for the savings on paper, toner, copiers and their services contracts, etc.

How much time is wasted searching for paper files? Digital documents can searched and viewed instantly from anywhere.

Paper is much harder to backup and restore than digital data.

Office square footage and off-site records storage adds to the cost of keeping paper documents.

Government mandates for records retention […]

What Document Management Systems are supported by PowerPDF Advanced 2.1?

Q: What Document Management Systems are supported by PowerPDF Advanced 2.1?

A: Document Management System support in the Advanced Edition

  • Microsoft® SharePoint Server 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)  3.0 and Microsoft Office 365
  • eDOCS DM (former Hummingbird Enterprise™ 5.3.1 and 10

Power PDF supports eDOCS systems  if a DM Extensions API is installed and configured on the client machine. The product is also integrated into Windows Explorer DM Extension.

  • Interwoven® WorkSite 8.3, 8.5 and 9.3

Power PDF supports Interwoven WorkSite systems if DeskSite 8.2 or FileSite 8.2  for WorkSite 8.3 or FileSite 8.5 for WorkSite 8.5 or DeskSite 9.3 or FileSite 9.3 for Work 9.2 is installed and configured on the client machine. The product is also integrated into DeskSite and FileSite clients. The Nuance implementation warns if a requested document is checked out to another user.

  • Livelink® ECM – Enterprise Server 9.7.0 and 10 from OpenText Corp.

Power PDF supports LiveLink ECM if a LiveLink Explorer Professional Windows Client is installed and configured on the client machine.

  • OpenText Enterprise Connect

Supports OpenText Content Server through Enterprise Connect if the  Enterprise Connect framework 10.5 or higher is installed and configured on the machine

  • NetDocuments SaaS cloud-based storage.

Save files to this web-based storage facility, providing Software as a Service (SaaS).

  • Worldox® GX3 and GX4
  • EMC2® Documentum 7.1,  6.7

Power PDF supports EMC2 Documentum if a DFC 6.5 client is installed and configured on the client machine.

  • Xerox DocuShare 6 and 6.5
  • OnBase 13+

To work with Hyland’s OnBase from Power PDF the Nuance module must be licensed on the OnBase server.

DMS PowerPDF Document Management Systems

How to have more control over the OCR process in PowerPDF

Q: How to have more control over the OCR process in PowerPDF?  For example, to edit the text in the OCR layer to correct mistakes.

A: As designed, Nuance PowerPDF does not offer this functionality .

Nuance Power PDF program offers a powerful built-in OCR engine but it only offers limited control over the OCR process.  To accomplish what the client is requesting you would specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program such as Nuance® OmniPage®.

There are many advantages in using this Nuance® OmniPage® Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program if you want more control over the OCR process.

  • Choose from four formatting levels instead of two (see below)
  • Win full control over the OCR process, including:
    • The ability to manually zone pages
    • Access to multi-lingual spell checking and proofing
    • Dynamic verifier image display to speed up editing
    • Voice readback facility
    • And much more.
  • Scan new pages into the converted document
  • Add new pages from fax, image files or digital cameras
  • Save to other formats, including OmniPage’s internal format for document sharing with other OmniPage users.

The four formatting levels offered for saving in OmniPage are:

The pages retain the layout of the originals. Graphics and framed elements are placed in text boxes. Whenever possible, other text is transferred without using text boxes. Power PDF offers this under the name Flowing Column.

The pages retain the layout of the originals, but all elements are placed in text boxes, including text in columns. Power PDF offers this formatting.

Text is decolumnized, but text attributes, graphics and tables are retained.

  1. Flowing Page
  2. True Page
  3. Formatted Text
  4. Plain Text

Text is decolumnized and rendered as plain text. Graphics and tables are retained, but not in their original locations. This option is convenient for users who want to reformat the content.

 

Configuring Nuance PDF output settings to include more than 500 pages per PDF

By default when using the Nuance Full-Text step each PDF that is generated can only contain 500 pages. The following steps can be used to increase the maximum number of pages that each PDF can hold beyond 500 pages.

By default the Nuance full-text step is designed to create 500 page PDF’s. Use the following steps to increase the default number:

This change should be made on all Capture Automation servers that will be generating PDF’s.

  1. Make a copy of the ClientSettings.xml file located at C:\Program Data\Digitech Systems
  2. From the desktop, click Start > Run > type services.msc and press <Enter>
  3. Highlight and right-click the PaperVision ProcessInitiator1 service and choose Stop
  4. Edit the ClientSettings.xml file using Notepad
  5. Add the following line of text:<OCRFullTextMaxPagePerDoc>500</OCRFullTextMaxPagePerDoc>
  6. Change the value from “500” to the number of pages that will be used to create each PDF (e.g. 750)
  7. Save and close the ClientSettings.xml file
  8. From the desktop, click Start > Run > type services.msc and press <Enter>
  9. Highlight and right-click the PaperVision ProcessInitiator1 service and choose Start

PDF Processing with FineReader and FineReader Server

How to create a PDF from Microsoft® Word, Excel, or PowerPoint

 

How to convert emails to PDF

 

How to Split a PDF

Create new PDF documents or separate PDF documents combined in one easily with FineReader PDF 15.

Learn how to split PDFs and extract pages easily.

 

 

How to create and edit interactive PDF forms

Watch this video and see how to edit and create interactive PDF forms quickly and easily.

Form Editor tool in FineReader PDF 15 allows creating and editing fillable PDF forms with text and date fields, dropdown lists, list boxes, checkmarks, radio buttons, signature fileds and action buttons. Collect information and create effective document templates with ease!

 

How to extract text from scanned PDFs

 

 

How to extract tables

 

 

How can I verify if the digital signature is valid?

If you open a document with a valid digital signature in FineReader, you will see a green notification Valid on the left panel of ABBYY FineReader PDF 15:
 mceclip0.png

Recognizing a document with existing text layer in FineReader PDF 15

  1. Open FineReader PDF 15;
  2. Go to Tools > Options > OCR;
  3. In the PDF recognition mode select Use OCR option:
  4.  Click OK;
  5.  Recognize your document again.

 

 

How to convert a document into an accessible PDF/UA

Make your mixed documents—PDF, scanned, photographed, or papers— digital and accessible.

In this […]

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Server On-Premise

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Server turns OmniPage into a true server-based OCR solution that is scalable to any volume by load-balancing across multiple servers. OmniPage Server is perfect for high-volume conversion projects or for distributing OCR throughout the enterprise.

SimpleIndex Pro Server 1M PPY

SimpleIndex Pro Server 1 million pages per year – ABBYY FineReader OCR Server, Accusoft Barcode Engine 1D/2D Client, DTK Barcode Engine 1D/2D Server & ISIS Scanning

Document capture solution with a one-click interface that automates your scanning and document filing by creating easy-to-find electronic content, saving you time and money.  It’s highly customizable to meet even the most detailed needs, with top quality technicians to support your requirements.

SimpleIndex OCR Workstation

Document capture solution with a one-click interface that automates your scanning and document filing by creating easy-to-find electronic content, saving you time and money.  It’s highly customizable to meet even the most detailed needs, with top quality technicians to support your requirements.

SimpleIndex OCR Workstation version
Includes:

basic text and barcode recognition,
ABBYY FineReader OCR Client,
TWAIN and ISIS scanning
1 Year Support & Upgrades

Why are the prices of OCR applications so different?

OCR software ranges in price from freeware all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars. What explains the difference between these applications? Here’s the breakdown:

  • OCR Freeware uses the SimpleOCR or Tesseract engines and provide limited scanning and output format capabilities. Recognition quality is generally poor except for the highest quality document images.
  • PDF OCR Converters provide good quality OCR engines like ABBYY, IRIS and OmniPage, but limit the output to searchable PDF files. These cost less than $100.
  • Standard OCR applications range from $100-$200 and provide full OCR capabilities including converting scans to Word, Excel, HTML and other editable formats.
  • Corporate OCR applications add advanced features like automated hotfolder processing, concurrent licensing and other features useful for business applications. Pricing for these is $200-$500.
  • OCR Servers provide scalable, enterprise OCR services for processing very high volumes of documents or providing OCR capabilities to users throughout the organization. Prices start around $1,500 and go up based on processing volume.
  • Enterprise Data Capture and Forms Processing applications are used to capture structured data from complex documents like healthcare claim forms and invoices that include things like tables, handwriting, checkboxes, and movable zones. These solutions can cost anywhere from around $1,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the document volume and complexity of the project.

Knowledge Base

The SimpleOCR Knowledge Base contains frequently asked questions and answers, technical guides and general information on a broad range of optical character recognition, handprint recognition, data capture, PDF OCR, AP invoice scanning and zone OCR applications.

Contact Us for FREE Consultation on Your OCR Project

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage – Ultimate

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has several unique features that make it stand out for a variety of applications. Some of these include auto-redaction, SharePoint integration, automatic filing with barcodes, PDF auto-bookmarking, form data collection and MFP support. Most of these new features are not available in the Standard edition.

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage – Standard

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Standard converts paper, picture, and PDF files into editable documents to save you considerable time and money by eliminating retyping. Your documents look just like the original – complete with text, tables, and graphics. OmniPage uses superior character accuracy to precisely format your documents so you can easily make changes.

ABBYY FineReader Server On-Premise

ABBYY FineReader Server On-Premise

Innovative server-based OCR software for performing centralized enterprise-wide OCR processing. Allows anyone on the network to submit files for OCR. Complex XML job specifications can be submitted to control output. Support available for Arabic and Asian languages.

 

Available in CPU, Total Page Count and Pages Per Year licensing models.

 

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate, 1 Year Subscription

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate, (1 Year Subscription) is an all-in-one business toolset for working with PDFs and document digitization. With FineReader PDF employees can work with both digitally created and scanned paper documents to fulfill various document-related tasks in the digital workplace effortlessly. ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate allows you to view, edit, search, comment and collaborate, sign and protect PDFs or compare document versions in different file formats to identify differences efficiently. Thanks to the seamlessly integrated AI-based OCR technology with FineReader you can also extract information from a PDF or convert the entire document to Word, Excel® for further editing. Document conversion can also be automated to prepare multiple documents for further processing.

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Standard, 1 Year Subscription

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Standard, (1 Year Subscription) is a PDF software application for working with PDF documents and scans. Powered by ABBYY’s AI-based OCR technology it allows you to convert and edit not only digital PDF documents, but also scanned paper documents with the same ease-of-use. With FineReader PDF you can view, edit, search, comment, sign, protect, extract text from PDFs and convert documents into Word, Excel® for further editing.

 

Convert Scanned Image to Text Document

The primary purpose of Optical Character Recognition is to quickly and automatically convert scanned images of machine-printed (typed) text – which to a computer are no more meaningful a collection of pixels than any other image, such as a landscape photo – into actual text data that you can search through and modify.

OCR Software comes in many different types, which vary in price range based on their features, speed, and accuracy. One of the main qualities that OCR producers are using to differentiate their products is volume of the documents OCR will allow you to process. That may be a bit counter intuitive but features that are needed to process hundreds, thousands or millions pages a year are rather different ones.

In case of several hundreds of pages (receipts, checks, medical, tax or legal forms, personal memorabilia)  you need to scan for personal use you would need light, highly versatile, easy to use, not expensive software that will convert images just to text. It may not have automation features, and processing data further will be done manually by you. Thou it is not too hard since volume of documents is not very large and you can treat each of them individually.

Small business users usually process thousands of pages a year and require some automation features. Images need to be converted not just to text, but also to spreadsheets to be processed further. Once the system is set up it is assumed that it will run without much of the interference, and people in charge of document processing would be able to do that with certain ease.

Larger companies processing millions of documents require much larger levels of automation when each small, fine tuned feature would save thousands of work hours in a long run. Multiple machines will be processing documents […]

PDF OCR

Searchable PDF OCR

Adobe Acrobat OCR to Searchable PDFCreating searchable PDF files using optical character recognition is one of the most common PDF OCR applications.

The PDF format works great with scanned documents because it allows the OCR text to be hidden in an invisible layer behind the original document image. So you see a perfect replica of the original instead of OCR text that lacks formatting and may contain artifacts and errors.

OCR PDF to Other Formats

Batch OCR PDF to Text, Excel, Word

PDF OCR can also mean converting scanned PDF files to Word, Excel, text and other formats. This can be done with any desktop OCR or OCR server application. However there are several OCR applications called PDF Converters that are only designed to convert documents to searchable PDF files rather than converting PDF files to other formats. This is an important distinction to make when searching for PDF OCR software.

PDF Converters often cost less than their full-featured desktop OCR counterparts since they only offer document scanning and conversion of images to searchable PDF files. They can also include the ability to convert other file formats like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, etc. to PDF automatically. Enterprise site licensing options let you enable this capability for any user in the organization. Contact us for a quote on site licenses for any PDF OCR application.

PDF OCR Compression

PDF also offers advanced compression options like MRC, JPEG2000 and JBIG that can produce much smaller files than traditional TIFF images. Foxit PDF Compressor is even able to parse the document and apply different compression to images, text and backgrounds to reduce the size even further. This can produce huge savings in cloud storage and access […]

MAC OCR Software

apple-ocr-for-automated-document-processing-macOSWhile the majority of OCR software is written for the Windows platform, a few of the major OCR engines have released versions for MacOS systems as well. Mac OCR software are often slightly more limited than their PC counterparts, and may not have the latest version of the OCR engine. However if you need to convert documents to text, Excel or searchable PDF files on your Mac, these are the best software options.

Currently, there are are professional versions of ABBYY FineReader and both pro and corporate versions of ReadIRIS available for MacOS.

When you scan a document that has text or numeric data on it, you are able to read and understand what is written in the scanned image. However, to a computer, the resulting image file is just as meaningless an assortment of pixels as a landscape photo. In order to transform this information into an editable format that you can search through, copy, and modify without retyping it manually, you will need the an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.

There is a wide variety of OCR software available. While they all share the ability to convert images of machine printed (not handwritten) text or numbers into an editable format, the various software often have different features, accuracy, prices, and language options.

Creates editable, searchable files and e-books from scans, PDFs and digital photographs. The most accurate OCR available for OSX, its unmatched recognition and conversion eliminates retyping and reformatting. Sophisticated yet remarkably intuitive, FineReader has an easy-to-use interface that makes even the most complex tasks simple.

Kofax Power PDF for Mac makes it easy to gain […]

Compare OCR Software

Applications

When you scan a document that has text or numeric data on it, you are able to read and understand what is written in the scanned image. However, to a computer, the resulting image file is just as meaningless an assortment of pixels as a landscape photo. In order to transform this information into an editable format that you can search through, copy, and modify without retyping it manually, you will need the an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.

There is a wide variety of OCR software available. While they all share the ability to convert images of machine printed (not handwritten) text or numbers into an editable format, the various software often have different features, accuracy, prices, and language options.

You can find the various types of OCR software with a description of each below.

Users within a single department, working from home or who have a small business can simply scan their documents to a folder that is shared to everyone. In this “ad-hoc” scenario you only need some basic document scanning software to simplify and bring consistency to your filing system.

If you want to move to the next level, there are Desktop Document Management options that provide an all-in-one means for capture, storage, search and retrieval of documents. Additionally, they provide security, advanced capabilities and ease of use above that of the ad-hoc methods

And let’s not forget cloud-based options that alleviate the need to maintain storage servers or keep software up to date.

Need a simple, no frills OCR solution without spending hundreds of dollars on a professional software package? Look no further. There is a no cost, donation optional, OCR freeware solution […]

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OCR Freeware


About SimpleOCR Freeware

Do you dread having to retype that document you are holding in your hand? If only you had the electronic file, your life would be so much easier. With SimpleOCR, you could easily and accurately convert that paper document into editable electronic text for use in any application including Word and WordPerfect.

Not only is SimpleOCR up to 99% accurate, it is 100% free.

Download SimpleOCR now or learn more its feature and functions.

Accuracy

With optical character recognition up to 99% accurate, there is no better OCR application for the price. This increased accuracy greatly reduces the need for post-recognition proof reading and correction. And after all, isn’t that why you want to OCR the document in the first place? Of course it is!

System Requirements

SimpleOCR works on any version of windows, from Windows 95-10 and beyond! Your scanner need only a TWAIN driver, the driver that comes with a majority of all scanners sold. In short, SimpleOCR will most likely work with the PC and scanner you already have.

Pricing

SimpleOCR is free for all commercial and non-commercial purposes. It may be re-distributed freely, but only in its original, unaltered form.

Download SimpleOCR Now

  • Huge Dictionary – With more than 120,000 words, it is unlikely that SimpleOCR will run into a word it does not know. In the rare event that it does, our improved text editor allows you to easily add the new word to the dictionary. By adding new words to the dictionary, SimpleOCR becomes better with every use.

  • Attention! SimpleOCR does NOT have any handprint OCR capabilities, it will not be able to recognize handwritten text. ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) is rather complicated software usually on a more expensive side.

  • Despeckle – For those documents which are not […]

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