PDF OCR comments:

By: Shankar

Shankar — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:42:39 -0400

Failed in installing in regular method, but successful by following #27. Thanks

By: GOTD Supporter

GOTD Supporter — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:19:27 -0400

It works very well IF the document has no formatting.

By: Vikram

Vikram — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:59:05 -0400

Good Program. Very Little features but does the jobs perfectely. Thanks GAOTD !

By: Allen

Allen — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:24:30 -0400

Downloaded and registered easily. This is the best pdf converter I have used. It is fast and accurate and unlike other converters it delivers text that can be edited. You do have to cut and paste from Text to whatever word processing system you use, but this is a small task. Thanks GAOTD. This is a keeper.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:03:35 -0400

First of all, some of you are a little confused as to what use this software might be. It is not a converter, to save PDF files as DOC files, for example. It doesn't preserve formatting, it just renders plain ASCII text. If you have a scanner, which many printers include, you may have OCR software already installed. However, this OCR software is usually for printed pages, or for fax files, like TIF files. Not many free OCR programs can scan a PDF file. So what use is this? Well, let's say you use NovaPDF or CutePDF to print an ebook that you've downloaded. The resulting file is likely to be bitmaps embedded in a PDF file. Or suppose you download an ebook from a newsgroup. Many of these are bitmap scans of books or magazines that have no text, only an image of the text. If you have a PDF ebook reader, you're probably OK, but let's say you have one of these MP4 players with an alleged ebook reader built in. Most of these only support text ebooks. So now you have a way to convert your PDF to a form you can read on your MP4 player. Or your "not-so-smart" phone, perhaps. How well does it work? I scanned 150 pages of a book in about 6 minutes, so it seems to be fast enough for most people. The recognition rate was fairly high, with most text rendered perfectly, although some fonts proved trouble to the OCR engine, particularly with the letter 'k', rendered as "l<", and the letter 'H' rendered as "i-i". These appear to be in chapter titles and with italic fonts, and can easily be fixed with a spell check and global find and replace, if you so choose. In all, an effective piece of software that does what it says, albeit not one that a lot of people may have a use for. But if you have a long commute on public transportation, and don't have a dedicated ereader, you might find this useful.

By: Kelly

Kelly — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:02:45 -0400

#43 -- I had the same problem and had to run "compatibility" for it. Right-click on the program file and select "Troubleshoot Compatibility". It was able to correct and I didn't have it shut down anymore.

By: mark

mark — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:48:19 -0400

There is no PDF OCR software anywhere at any price that can do a perfect conversion or handle heavy formatting. I had no problem with this PDF OCR installation. It produces the output in WordPad. The first pdf page I tested was very complex - a Hebrew to English transliteration consisting of Hebrew characters, Hebrew words written with the English alphabet, and the English language translation. PDF OCR converted the Hebrew characters into some garbled text, but the Hebrew words in English alphabet came across perfectly, as did the regular English words. The original PDF had many columns, and PDF OCR converted the columns into rows of plain text sentences, which is what I wanted in this case, but certainly not in all cases. So if your pdf has columns, be aware that this PDF OCR only converts by rows across all columns, rather than converting one column and then the next. Would be great to have a choice of converting by row or column.

By: Giovanni (King of Freebies....LOL!!)

Giovanni (King of Freebies....LOL!!) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:32:27 -0400

Today's giveaway is not bad at all and definitely worth downloading and not just because it's FREE for 24 hours...LOL!! As for FREEWARE ALTERNATIVE I recommend the following apps: 1) to convert PDF files to editable WORD DOCUMENTS: AnyBizSoft PDF to Word FREE VERSION 2) to Convert a Scanned (IMAGE) Document to a PDF File you can use FREE ONLINE CONVERTERS such as ZAMZAR or FreePdfConvert or better yet a FREE nice app called "IMAGE TO PDF CONVERTER FREE". With this FREE TOOL you can batch convert (scanned) image files (supports JPG, BMP, PNG, TIF, TGA, GIF formats) to PDF document, set page size and PDF information, such as title, subject, author, etc. Pls note that this tool is standalone software, so it doesn't require Adobe Acrobat Reader and above all it doesn't depend on any print driver meaning that it will NOT install any print driver on your PC. AMAZING for a FREE APPLICATION, isn't it? ENJOY!!

By: Law

Law — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:49:50 -0400

@48 You have to register using the key provided in the readme file when you unzip the package.

By: August

August — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:47:42 -0400

Many people appear to be confused about what this does. Some people have tried to explain. Please allow me to summarize and clarify: There are two different ways that a PDF may show you a page: - Formatted text with fonts and lines made up of individual characters - A picture of a page A third form is an overlapped combination of the two. Adobe makes an expensive, corporate product that does the OCR at the same time as the scanning. It shows you the image and has the OCR text hidden but selectable. But the basic two forms are still there, along with their basic limitations. The first form starts with a Word file or other document. All the words are specified, the fonts, the spacing, etc., inside Word. The PDF contains all that information, usually as boxes, one for each line, and the PDF Reader puts that on your screen. The Reader BUILDS the image out of the text and font information in the PDF file. The second form starts with a picture of the page. This picture was probably taken by a scanner, but it is just an image. As far as the file structure is concerned, it could be an album of baby photos. There are no words in the file, just image data. PDF-to-Word converters work with the first type of PDF. They look inside the PDF file and find the text and the formatting details. Some just give you that with the individual PDF boxes, one for each line, the text, the font, and the position on the page. Some apply some intelligence and try to figure out which lines go together into a paragraph, but that information is usually not contained inside the PDF, it has to be figured out. The program has to interpret intent, with is more AI that file format conversion. (A newer form of PDF from Adobe has "reflowable" text and does keep the paragraphs together. But that makes bigger files and the reflow can only be done if you edit the file with Acrobat Pro, so at this time most PDFs do not include reflowable text.) This program is for the second form of PDF, where the file does not have the text, just a picture. This program uses OCR technology to figure out that one picture blob is an "A" and another similar picture blob is a "B". Some people appear to expect that because a PDF-to-Word type of program can extract the font and tell you that some text is Ariel and some Helvetica, that this program ought to be able to do that too. But that is like comparing Morse Code to Mozart because they both have rhythm. This program is about OCR, about recognizing the Optical Characters, reading the blobs. To expect it to recognize fonts too is way too much for today's technology. Even professional designers have trouble identifying exact fonts when they have full alphabets and high-resolution images to work with. Some OCR system do make guesses at fonts, sometimes guessing as many as four different fonts in the same word which you then have to manually fix. And, as I mentioned above in the limitations of PDF-to-Word converters, deciding what makes a paragraph is a bigger problem. This program will save you the trouble of reading the page and retyping it. Mostly. The more fuzzy your images, the more mistakes it will make. But it will not recreate the original source document for you. I hope this helps, August