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Saturday, March 27, 2021

Very Little is Free

 The Soda PDF program which I used for OCR would not install after the recent hard disk unpleasantness, so I went looking for other solutions.  (I am still hoping Soda PDF support gets back to me with a solution.)  ReadIris came with my HP printer, but perhaps because of Windows 10 it cannot see the scanner and therefore will not work.  Several free OCR solutions would only OCR jpgs and similar images--not PDFs.  One tried to download a Trojan, so that is off the list.  I was prepared to pay for Adobe Acrobat DC (the non-free version) that does OCR.  The PDFs had some embedded text, so Adobe said to export the PDF as a TIFF, import as a PDF, then OCR.  But it did not consider the TIFF it exported as valid.  I am not buying a product that buggy.

3 comments:

  1. I use NAPS2 for scanning/OCR/PDF processing. It’s free and open source and made mincemeat of a file cabinet I had to push through a high speed Fujitsu scanner. Give it a look.

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  2. Not free, but it has a trial -- Nitro Pro. I've been using it for years, actually long before it was "Pro." I scan a lot of books and OCR the resulting PDFs.

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  3. I use Foxit for PDF files.
    I bought the paid version (about $125) for the ability to handle OCR, and modify documents.
    I'm very happy with it.

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