There are certain circumstances in everyone’s life to extract Text from an image and edit it. A few years back, it was not even imaginable. But, with the ever-developing technology and introduction of free OCR software, it is quite possible to extract text from an image. Convert that text into word, excel, page maker, pdf, or any other plain text document.
While you are working in an office you have probably thought once more than once about OCR software. But what is OCR? what if we convert multiple pdf files in just a few clicks. In this article, we explain what is OCR? What does OCR stand for? and the most popular use cases.
To make this happen, there are certain types of free OCR tools or software. Which is artificial intelligence-based software that will help you turn pictures into words. It can make any digital picture or document into editable Text or you can easily manage these documents. You can convert images into TextText from your pc, phone, or tablet anywhere.
There are tons of OCR Software available in the Free and Paid market. But, we have handpicked some of the best OCR Software to convert images to TextText to save your time. We have also given their site’s link below. These are both free and paid software, and you can pick anyone according to your needs.
Top 15 Best OCR Software for Windows & Mac to Scan Images to Text
#1 Tesseract
Download Link – https://opensource.google/projects/tesseract
Tesseract is a free OCR software. It was developed by Hewlett-Packard (H.P.) as software in 1980. Now, its sponsors are Google. Tesseract has been considered the most reliable and free optical character recognition software.
Tesseract is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This software could only recognize the English language at the beginning of this software. But, with the upgrade of every new version, it adds more new languages to it. French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, German, Brazilian, Spanish, etc., are some of the languages.
We can say that it can recognize almost every language available on earth. It can also read some of the ancient Texts written from right to left. Also, the accuracy rate of Tesseract is very good. If the image quality is low, it will affect the output of the Tesseract. When there are blurry pictures or screenshots are not taken from a proper angle. Then, it cannot function and will not deliver you the desired results.
#2 Cuneiform
Download Link – https://launchpad.net/cuneiform-linux
Cuneiform is a freeware OCR Software developed by a Russian company. It was first developed in 1993. This system first came as a scanner. It is an OCR programmer or software developed to turn electronic copies into an editable text document without changing the structure. The languages that Cuneiform supports are English, German, French, Dutch, Bulgarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, etc.
Since it can detect almost any language, it sometimes fails to recognize some text. In the early times, Cuneiform was used in Brother IC-150 scanners, which worldwide recognized this software. Xerox also shake hand with the Cuneiform recognition system. Later on, it comes up with a tagline of “What you scan is what you get.”
#3 Microsoft OneNote
Download Link – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onenote/digital-note-taking-app?rtc=1
Microsoft OneNote supports OCR applications. By which, it lets you copy Text from any form of digital photo or scanned photo, and then you can paste the copied text into an editable sheet. It is not possible from the OneNote web. You have to use the OneNote desktop app on your pc or Mac to do it. This free OCR software makes it simple to copy Text from anything and use it as Text anywhere. You need right to click the photo from which you want to extract Text and click copy text, and then it copies the next text.
Now, you can paste it anywhere. It doesn’t immediately convert the image into text format. It takes some time to convert them. So you can wait for some time to do its work. Once its work is done, then you can copy and paste it.
#4 Scantron
Download Link – https://www.scantron.com/
Scantron is an American Company which is based in Minnesota. It delivers all sorts of services and products to its regular customers. They are known for their high quality of products and services. After delivery services are also very up to the mark, they aim to please customers’ needs and make them happy. Scantron focuses on printers and scanners.
It is shocking for one to know that it covers almost 98% of U.S. schools, 56 countries, and 48 ministries of education all around the world with its products and services. They are good at their optical mark recognition (OMR) software, which helps analyze multiple-choice questions in schools and colleges.
#5 Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
Download Link – https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/acrobat-pro.html
Adobe acrobat dc OCR is a whole bunch of software and web services. It helps you create, print, and convert them into PDF files. Adobe Acrobat helps view, print, and convert the OCR image to text. All these services are both free and paid, and you can choose either of them according to your needs. The premium subscription will give you additional features, which will help you more in your work.
This free OCR software converts image text into a document format. Adobe is available on both Windows and macOS. With their help, you can create, convert pdf to jpg, edit, sign, export, import, and publish them into PDF to word formats.
#6 VueScan
Download Link – https://www.hamrick.com/
VueScan is software that will help you in scanning images. Its specialty is in scanning photographs and negatives. It also supports optical character recognition of images containing TextText. The VueScan software is free OCR software and easy to download. But, if you use it for free, there is a watermark. If you want to remove the watermark, you need to buy its paid version, otherwise, you can continue with its paid version.
VueScan supports English and 32 other languages for optical character recognition. It was estimated that the owner of VueScan was earning USD 3 million from just license income every year.
#7 ABBYY FineReader
Download Link – https://www.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/
ABBYY fine text OCR reader is an application/software developed by ABBYY. Its first version was released in 1993. This software allows you to convert pictures to text, convert images to text, scan documents, pdfs to editable text documents into Ms. Word, Ms. Excel, Ms. Power Point, CSV, get a text from the image, and plain text files, etc.
Its version 15 allows it to detect TextText from almost 192 languages worldwide. It also has a spell check to correct the spelling in more than 48 languages. This software recognizes the character and adds it to the recognition alphabet. It was adding that new character to the list to be detected the next time. There are almost 20+ million users of ABBYY all over the world.
#8 Photo Scan
Download Link – NA
Photo Scan helps you generate or scan the images to convert them into TextText. This software is very effective, easy, and understandable for anyone using it. There are many situations where you can take help from this software. It can be importing TextText from any photo or scanned image. It also generates Q.R. codes of the TextText or images.
Photo Scan has built-in camera support. Photo Scan OCR-supported software is updated with new features and extra features. In this free ocr software, you can extract text in many languages. One extra feature that it offers is that it gives you TextText to speech support. After extracting the TextText from the image, you can save it and share it with your friends and family.
#9 Amazon Textract
Download Link – https://aws.amazon.com/textract/
Amazon Textract is based on a concept called machine learning. It will help you extract TextText from images, photos, scanned documents, and even handwritten documents in digital format. Its features are beyond all other optical character recognition (OCR) software. So many companies need to extract data from hard copies to digital formats. It can be accessed to extract data to use it.
It can also read tables and extract data from them. The Amazon Textract software helps automate the data extracting process. It can extract data in minutes. If you have any sensitive data or secret information, you can keep a human to check the extracted data.
#10 FreeOCR
Download Link – http://www.paperfile.net/
FreeOCR can convert PDFs, tiff images, and other file formats. It helps in converting the scanned copies of documents to an editable text document which can be later converted into a text document. The converted text document can be transferred to Ms. Word, Ms. Excel, Ms. Power Point, and others. It uses the latest version of the Tesseract OCR function. It is very simple to use the software.
This Tesseract function helps in achieving more accurate and correct results. Google, an open-source product, released it. The developer of FreeOCR is H.P.(Hewlett Packard). Google keeps its source code. It is free of use, and you can use it the way you want it, and it can be used for commercial use.
#11 Readiris
Download Link – https://www.irislink.com/EN-US/c2263/Readiris-PDF-Standard–World-class-PDF-manager.aspx
Readiris is the most popular pdf extraction and free OCR software. It allows users to extract data from many sources. It can e-sign, compress, edit and compose the filed outputs. You can also share your single or multiple pdf formats with anyone in any format; if you work daily on Ms. Word, Ms. Excel, Ms. Power Point, and Spreadsheet, then you need this software. We require to collect some data from the material, which is in written form.
To collect it from that hard copy, we can either write the whole data again or extract it by using these optical character recognition software. With the help of Readiris, you can protect, share, review, manage, annotate, sign, edit, create, convert screenshots to text, or can convert any document.
#12 ReadSoft
Download Link – https://www.kofax.com/products/readsoft-online
ReadSoft automates the capturing process of invoices from any source in any format you provide. It saves your time to extract the important matter, and scan text from the image. It saves your precious time so that your team, company, and you can put that precious time elsewhere to build your other processes. This also reduces your labor work. The more automation, the less labor it needs.
It is an Artificial Intelligence-based software that extracts data from any format. ReadSoft helps in automating the invoice processing of your company. It is cost-reducing and more profit-generating software that helps you generate invoices.
#13 Capture2Text
Download Link – http://capture2text.sourceforge.net/
Capture2Text enables any person to extract any part of a document with the help of OCR. The extracted text document can be copied and pasted. Operating systems like Windows 7, 8/8.1, 10, and XP can support this software. There is no need to install Capture2Text to use it. Some of the languages it supports are English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and many others. One can also download an OCR dictionary to take help. It can simplify things for you to understand the processing of the software.
#14 SmartScore
Download Link – https://www.musitek.com/
SmartScore is a music optical recognition software. That helps extract notation from any scanned format. It can transport and arrange the dynamic music formats into desired text document formats. This free OCR software can arrange, perform or educate any music album. You can download its trial version for free. All its versions include English and German languages. They also have a discount for schools and churches.
The developers of SmartScore have experience of 30 years in this industry. It is a fast working, simplified user interface transcribing software. There are different editions such as Professional Edition, Songbook Edition, Pro Edition, Guitar Edition, Piano Edition, MIDI Edition, etc.
#15 SimpleOCR
Download Link – https://www.simpleocr.com/
SimpleOCR is not freeware software. You can live chat with the specialists or have a consultation call on your phone. It has thousands of users all around the world and still counting. SimpleOCR has a simple user interface with easy-to-understand handling rules. SimpleOCR is a royalty-free OCR software that offers power scans and is built for business purposes. It captures and delivers the scanned TextText to you. It can be used as OCR text scanner software if you don’t want to retype the hard copy of any document. Anybody can use it for free. It has a paid version also where you need to pay a nominal amount of fees to access its advanced features.
Elegibble’s Final Words
These OCR Software will save your precious time not to type the whole digital Text or pictured Text again. We all live in a society that has been dependent upon the printed TextText for a long time.
It will take time to go digital with paper, and the paperless society is a future concept that will take time to execute. Until then, you can use these OCR tools to extract TextText to make them editable.
Either these OCR Software are free or cost you a few pence, and you can go with whichever software fulfills your demands. We hope you have figured out the best OCR software for you. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below if we have missed any important OCR Software in the above list.
