The arrival of smartphones has meant that certain tasks that only large companies with large teams carried out, we can perform them from our home with the help of our computer or with the smartphone only.
The digitization of documents (and that it is accessible by computer programs) is one of those tasks that has become more accessible thanks to the smartphone and the computer. Now, with a mobile phone and a Windows computer, we can digitize large amounts of documents and images that we have at home and convert them to text documents such as a word document or a pdf file.
However How do you go from image to text? It is a good question that is solved thanks to a type of software called OCR that allows us to convert the text of the images into text documents, whether they are ebooks or Word documents.
Here are three OCR programs or tools that we can install in our Windows 10 and that will help us digitize our documents with a smartphone camera and a Windows 10 computer and convert them into digital text documents.
SimpleOCR
This OCR software is one of the oldest in the industry. It spreads under freeware license, which means that we can use it at home without any limit or pay for it.
SimpleOCR is supported with many text and image formats. Which means that we can export the text to Word, txt, html, etc ... And we can extract text from images that are in jpg, tiff, png, etc ...
We can get this program through the official website. Once downloaded, we install it and select the Spanish language so that it recognizes this language, although if we want to digitize a document in English, we have to select the language to English.
FreeOCR
FreeOCR is a free program, like SimpleOCR, but this program has a great Spanish engine, which allows us to better digitize and recognize parts of text in Spanish. FreeOCR is more up-to-date software than other options such as SimpleOCR, which makes it work better, but does not mean that there are no unrecognized parts of the text. FreeOCR also allows us to export text documents in pdf format, something very useful if we want to share the obtained document. FreeOCR can be obtained through its official website .
Abby finereader
Abby Finereader is a proprietary option, that is, you have to pay for it. I'm not usually a big fan of it, but this time it's worth the exception. This software is one of the best to recognize text, not only because of its high level of recognition but because it allows batch recognition, that is, creating a document with text from several images.
Furthermore, this document can be exported in any text format, from txt to pdf through doc or epub. Recently, ABBY has developed a solution similar to Adobe, that is, to offer your software through a web application.
This service will allow us to have all the work on any team and process any image without depending on a specific scanner or hardware model. Of course, this service works per scanned page, a fact to take into account if we have a low budget, since a batch of a thousand images or ten thousand images would be a high cost.
Conclusion
Nowadays, anyone generates a huge amount of documents and sheets that in the end suppose a great space. This can be solved with an OCR tool, a smartphone and a Windows 10 computer. means that we use it to pirate books or other similar purpose.
The good thing about these three tools is that they can all be tested for free, so we can make comparisons with the same image or with the same image pack and choose the program that suits us, although personally I consider that the three programs are very good option to use with a Windows 10 computer Do not you think?
I am missing UFOCR, since it is able to extract the text correctly even if it comes in columns.