kryp teller, See https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/611e8fac14e5a75f83ace528542e69d6351f36033a0d4eabfb486f53e1616787/details

It gives the results of WordPad.exe, as included in PDF OCR 4.7. I think they "borrowed" that file from Microsoft:

Copyright © Microsoft Corp. 1998
Original Name WORDPAD.EXE
File Version 1.1
TimeStamp 2010:05:13 16:39:26+02:00
Compilation Timestamp 2010-05-13 14:39:26
Creation Time 2010-05-13 14:39:26
Signature Date 2019-03-23 03:33:00
Signers Xi'an Pantuowangluokeji co, ltd.

kryp teller, Xi'an Pantuowangluokeji co, ltd. is the new owner of PDFZilla:

À noter que PDFZilla est devenu la propriété du même éditeur chinois (Xi'an Pantuowangluokeji co, ltd)

http://www.gratilog.net/xoops/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9256&forum=9&post_id=193256

I was able to register it after closing it down and restarting it from its folder.

Clairvaux, agreed, they should store the activation data in a user writable location OR request elevation if the activation is stored in a system wide location for all users just before the activation write is performed OR used Windows Vista and above protected location vitrualisation.

And yes allowing OCR to produce output for graphics mistakenly guessed to be text should never happen it is very simple to include vocabulary files for all the languages that the OCR engine support and NOT allow it to produce garbage non-words. maybe optionally permitting mathematical symbols for OCR'ing scientific papers or other scanned documents incorporating equations. but allowing the OCR engines raw output is very lazey and messy.

tristram, you can change the output folder by editing the "path.ini" file in the program directory.

starvinmarvin, Today we have mike and TK.

starvinmarvin,

The "Gold Standard" in reviews / reviewers -- and I think it was _here_, rather than @ that other giveaway site -- was a fellow named Giovanni. He told it like it was, thoroughly, Pro & Con, reliably and without bias. Unfortunately, he is long gone, and you'd probably have to look back more than 2 years for those reviews, if that is even possible. He was a breath of fresh air, in start contrast to certain *shill* reviewers that you will see repeatedly (again, largely at that other site), who endlessly recycle all-too-familiar boilerplate in their (usually laudatory) reviews. They forfeited credibility a long time ago. I think most reasonably experienced readers can spot whether a review is reliable -- or not.

Gene,

Typos -- the bane of my existence ! That should have read "in stark contrast." (You can add "knowledgeable" to my string of Giovanni adjectives.)

starvinmarvin, Ashraf was one

starvinmarvin, Some of the others I can recall were:
Fubar
Giovanni
Karl
mike
MikeR

I remember White Rabbit

Joe T., Yes I remember Fubar and Ashraf, and Giovanni. I especially liked Fubar reviews. Those days are gone and so are the good giveaways! And Whiterabbit too but he is still here, just on the games site. I know there were some others too but can't remember their names. I trusted all those guys reviews before I decided whether or not to install programs.

starvinmarvin, Hi .
I saw your question days ago , but I needed some time to
dig into my oooold archives to find the name of the guys
that (I think) you are looking for .

The first name is Ashraf .
I didn't have to look for his name because I've never forgot it .
For me he was the best .
He was commenting on the GAOTD giveaways many years ago
and for many years .
He was giving a lot of information about the giveaway and proposing
some alternatives too .
He was the owner of a similar to the GAOTD site called dottech
(http://dottech.org/) .
Later he created two more sites of the same nature :
http://sharewareonsale.com/
and
http://failmid.com/
I think that they all still exist .
As I said , he was great , but at some point , some years ago , he
stopped commenting .
The how and why can be discussed some other time .
For me it was a big loss for both the visitors of the GAOTD site and
the GAOTD site itself .

The second best (for me) was Giovani
His commenting style was very similar to the style of Ashraf .
I think he was a programmer and owner of a software company .
For some time he coexisted with Ashraf and continued for a few years
after Ashrafs "departure" from the GAOTD site .
He too stopped commenting some years ago .

There were also some other pretty good guys .
I can't remember their names and I didn't have the energy to look for them ,
but I remember that at some point there were three guys called Mike !!!
They were pretty good but one of them was very good and I think that he
is still around .

That's all for now .
If in the future I manage to remember more names I will write a message as
a "reply" to your comment here at this page .

I hope that I was successful at my archeological expedition and useful to you . ;-)

PS . After reading the other replies I have a few words about them .

1) Thank you Joe T for reminding me Fubar and the other Mikes.
I think there was a Mike T too .
2) White Rabbit was and still is the lead commenter for the Game giveaways
and (if I remember correctly) rarely commented on software giveaways .

Howe,
I registered the key manually and with CapsLock = ON.
Win 10 64 bits ok.

Carlos, Thanks I just tried installing again, even manually, it still won't do it. I don't have the magic touch, this wasted way too much time, see ya.

Ootje, thank you, it doesn't seem very good.

Ek het darem lekker gelag vir daardie laaste link :)

Ootje, others miss Giovanni, MikeR, Karl and other people who gave reviews here. I'm very happy you still support us! I like how you actually try out the software and provide examples of how it works. Simple and helpful. You've been doing this for a long time now, thank you!

A program installing itself directly on C:\... Sloppy does not begin to describe it.

Another commenter has shown that it includes a pirated copy of Microsoft WordPad. Plus, it requires admin rights.

Unsurprisingly, this is a Chinese program. At that point, I'm prepared to learn that all your OCR'ed documents are surreptitiously uploaded to a server over there. Someone should check it.

I had to scan a 60-page paper document with embedded images, fancy formatting, multiple fonts etc.. I tried a couple of OCR programs and got results that, while maybe 99% accurate on the plain text, were unsatisfactory due to problems with the formatting, embedded images, and changing fonts. So I dragged out an ancient copy of Adobe Acrobat (v6 I think) and used its OCR. Results: near perfect. So my recommendation if you have an OCR job that's tough and important, register for the free trial of Acrobat: https://acrobat.adobe.com/ca/en/acrobat/how-to/ocr-software-convert-pdf-to-text.html

LE, I doubt you'll find any of these programs that are 100% accurate, but here's an extract from a bus timetable converted to text by this program:

Pendoggett, Cornish Arms (NE-bound) 0942 1332 1603 7 1837 7
Delabole, opp Post Office 0949 1339 1610 7 1844 7
I'.‘ ' L ' , opp Smugglers 0953 1343 1614 1633 1848 7
Camelford, Post Office (SW-bound) 1003 7 7 1643 1858 7

and the same converted by the free program "PDF Shaper Free":

Pendoggett, Cornish Arms (NE-bound) 0942 1332 1603 1837
Delabole, opp Post Office 0949 1339 1610 1844
Delabole, opp Smugglers 0953 1343 1614 1633 1848
Camelford, Post Office (SW-bound) 1003 1643 1858

(column alignment is more accurate viewed in Notepad with a non-proportional font)

Felix Crevat, Yes, last I know of, you can legally download and use Adobe Acrobat Professional v 8.

Iliyan,

FWIW, PDF files can contain actual text -- if permissions allow, you can select the text & copy/paste into another app, e.g. Notepad -- &/or they can contain a picture of the text, which is what all OCR works with.

Iliyan, isn't that the only type of PDF file that needs complete OCR of to add the text layer to the raster scanned content?

There are other types of generated PDF files that have the text rendered as vector shapes instead of text rendered by embeded fonts. That is often done to prevent easy editing or simple copy and paste of the content. A good OCR program will recognise the letter shapes too. The PROBLEM I see with this software is it DOES NOT OCR the PDF file and insert text layers into the PDF so the scanned text can be searched and coppied and pasted but just produces a text file of it's attempts to OCR the PDF which is NOT what is needed in most cases.

Adobe Acrobat Pro on the other hand has OCR built in that does add the text layer to the OCR'd PDF file... though viewing and editing just the text layer is not as easy to do as editing a text file so some OCR mistakes could be underlying the graphics layers.

Acrobat 8.0 and 7.0 are available for free if you know where and when to look:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130508063700/http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/

for Acrobat 7.0 pro + key

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20130119004430/http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/

Which has Acrobat 8.0 Pro + key included.


Some archived links only work when you choose the earliest saves and not the latter ones!
Enjoy, just remember they are no longer supported and as such should never be used as default PDF viewers or display PDF files within a browser window with them as they predate the patching to protect from malicious PDF files. SO dive into acrobats prefernces and lock the program down by disabling the convenience features like view in browser and plaing non-pdf content in external programs etc and unless you need javascript support while editing a PDF disable that too and that should mitigate most if not all unsolicited exploits of adobe PDF rendering programs.

Martin Robson, I thought that may turn out to be the case but I wasn't going to allow it to install to the root of C drive.
They must have delusions of grandeur if they consider themselves too important to install to Program Files / Program Files (x86) as does everyone else.
Uninstalled.

Tyke, no they don't consider themselves too importent but they are too ignorant to figure out how to put files that must be written to in the proper folders so they can be written to without administrator rights... IF you change the installation location to the Program Files * heirachy then in order to get registration to survive a restart of the program then you HAVE to have the program running as an adminstrator to activate the program because that process changes the last 2 bytes of the file sound.dll because it's NOT a DLL file but a text file with lots of numbers and letters it should be placed in either ProgData subfolder if the activation is intended to be system wide or Users Appdata subfolder if activation is supposed to be per user based. This sort of ignorance comes from when either the teacher or the developer is completely self taught and never bothered to read any of the offical documentation describing best programming practices so just muddle through how ever they can bodge a program together through itteration. (trial and error)

TK, in addition to that because of the way this program is built of seperate modules from different developers and does not OCR PDF content directly but converts PDF pages into individual TIFF pages of some arbitary fixed resolution and that exported TIFF page is written to another non-standard temporary folder in C:\OCRtmp that only exists while an OCR is taking place... this developer has obviously never heard of the systems %TEMP% environment variable pointing to where such temporary folders and files should be placed.

Martin Robson, It registered fine for me. Here's my hypothesis:
1. Perhaps it must be in the default installation directory as that is where it stores the registration info (file named "sound.dll").
2. Perhaps your antivirus is preventing the program from modifying the dll file? Try temporarily disabling your antivirus?
3. Perhaps you're using a newer version of OS that I am and Windows 7,8, or 10 is preventing the dll file modification? Computer I still use for most giveaways is old XP. I have a Windows 7 comp but rarely use it.
Anyways, something to think about...

Also forgot to mention copy and paste worked fine for me...
And this has been given away many times in the past. Here are the links if you'd like to read the comments:

PDF OCR
https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/pdf-ocr-ocr-pdf/

PDF OCR 4.2
https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/pdf-ocr42/

PDF OCR 4.3
https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/pdf-ocr-43/

PDF OCR 4.3.1
https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/pdf-ocr-4-3-1/

PDF OCR 4.3.3
https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/pdf-ocr-4-3-3/

Artur Babecki, Thank you for that information. I've already uninstalled it due to its terrible OCR work.

Artur Babecki, Not true, I used copy and paste just fine... activated just fine. If you enter keys manually when you could have selected and coppied then pasted you are asking for transcription errors.

Artur Babecki, I tried it both ways. I first pasted it and got "Invalid serial code". Then I tried it several times manually. It didn't make any difference in my case when I installed manually I still got "Invalid serial code". Uninstalling.

Spontz, I have this problem. Simply deinstal the app. Sincerely, Roby.

I typed the reg. code in manually as suggested rather than copy and pasted it and it STILL says, "registered successfully!, restart program", then when I do, it STILL remains unregistered!.

Ditto. Won't register.

Neil, registered fine here but I read the instructions in the readme.txt and modified my actions acordingly... I suspect you and all those that had problems activating this giveaway did not! Am I right?

TK, No.

Neil, so did you try running the program as an administrator before entering the license code and then restarting and it still remained showing unregistered?
If you did then maybe there was a problem with some odd configurations.... if you didn't then your answer should have been "quite possible" and not "No" LOL

Tyke, SO try following the instructions in the readme.txt file if you are going to change the default installation folder from an unprotected location to a rights protected location!

taylor,
You could always start your own web site and give away just programs you approve of.

taylor, since when does this one ask for any personal information? the key is in the readme.txt file! You do not have to register anything online, in fact you shouldn't!