Funny, it says version 4.3 here, but on their site it says 4.1
Which is it as the about doesn't give a version and all it says on the top of it is Version 4.

I'm with #40. Chill out folks! People making comments--including mine--are offering OPINIONS. Some opinions are about the software program being offered, some are about other alternative programs, some are about the opinions of people leaving comments, and some are about the weather from time-to-time. I urge anyone who has trouble reading others' OPINIONS about software being offered here (or anything else) do themselves a favor by avoiding any chance of turmoil and just not read the comments. I myself appreciate ALL the comments, and look forward to all feedback about the offered programs as well as alternatives thereto (whether free or not). And, yes, I usually do not agree with all of the comments, but I recognize that I'm usually reading others' OPINIONS...and respect them. As for the software, I truly appreciate software authors and companies offering their products for review and feedback. I've found some excellent programs that I probably would never have found on my own. So thanks to GAOTD (or GATD or GOTD or whatever you prefer). Keep up the good work.

It states that PDF OCR is compatible with Windows 2000 but the downloaded GAOTD setup.exe file does not run on Windows2000. So GAOTD has discontinued all support even though the offered program/app does?

Interesting, lots of thew anti-Ashraf comments say the version from his website requires paying for? Now it does not, but some commentators said the link near the bottom of Ashraf's page. Why has no-one pointed out that the link for paid software near the bottom of the page is normal website advertising for PDFCreator, not gImageReader, or tesseract at all. That is not Ashraf's doing, but the normal targeted website advertising that almost all websites use now.

Also, there is confusion between pdf-to-text and pdf OCR software. you need to understand how a pdf works. A pdf can be thought of pictures and texts in a zipped file (very simplified, but you get the idea if you read on). So a pdf-to-text program simply stripps out the text from the pictures. Any text that appears in a picture will not be stripped out by such a program. For that you need an OCR program, whether a normal one or a pdf OCR. These progams take images and try to recognize any pattern in the image that looks like characters.

Adobe reader is certainly bloated, but a lot of the bloat even in the free reader, is that it contains an ocr program. So that the text in pictures from scanned documents made into a pdf for example, can be searched, or even the recognized text read out in "Read Aloud" mode for the vizually impaired for example. Even Adobe's free Reader actually works very well, better than any other I've tried infact. It is however a big program because of the in-built OCR and text-to-speech that is built in.

does this convert receipts? Would love to be able to scan all my receipts and catagorize and total them. thanks

#2 and #5 you are starting to see the light.

I tried to go the Free Image OCR website to complain about the devious installation of malware. I didn't make it that far because of a red flag warning by Web of Trust. I just uninstalled it. I'd steer way clear of this. Thanks for nothing Giovanni.

Heads up to people thinking about trying FreeImageOCR based on Giovanni's recommendation. I was very careful during installation to make sure I selected "do not install" for the crap toolbar add-ons that I knew were going to be bundled with it. And of course, it installed them anyway. Now I'm wasting time trying to get rid of them. Go to hell FreeImageOCR.

Good to see you back Ashraf, despite the negative comments, those who followed you missed you and I registered at your site quite some time ago (years) and I am not disappointed - I agree with #14.
Thank you for dotTech and as always, thank you GOTD!!!

This is worthless...good thing I not pay for this, the coversion look like this.

"lI_I II] I. , _ The Committee hea-received a qumper ef Qeguegmg ._.,___ fpgma, "

and

"anyone heme who wishe$.f0[be-heard and has not aL;eady.dpne; III "

People show their pettiness when they criticize Ashraf, Giovanni, Fubar and others who are major contributors to GAOTD forum. I very much like these people to be paid for their time and contributions. There is no free lunch. We must thank Ashraf he doesn't charge a fee to visit his site!!

People! stop being so small-minded.

Thanks Ashraf, thanks Giovanni. Thanks GOTD for PDF OCR 4.3. Each has given me much more than my money's worth. Having said that, I also would like to humbly caution everyone about downloading "free" software especially from other countries. I have tried to download programs recommended by Giovanni from Germany and now Russia. I have never gotten the "free" program but have had other unwanted software installed on my machine. The latest was ABBYY Screenshot reader. I can not read Russian, but there is only one thing you can do on the page given in Giovanni's post, and that is give them your email address. Then you get a link emailed to you inside a Russian email. All you can do with the email is click the one long link, which installs a download manager on your machine, then goes away. No reader. No English. Second time for me.
The last time was a German Company with much the same outcome. Lucky for me Giovanni also turned me on to ToolWhiz TimeFreeze (among many other very useful Programs from Giovanni) You just can't restart to see if the promised program really is installed somewhere (waiting to finish installation with a restart) as TimeFreeze zeros out its session on restart, so it's off to the lengthy virus scan, malware scan, register scan and clean for me. Lesson learned. Slow learner. Second time's the charm. Won't be a third. Not a complaint as everyone's input on this site has made even a novice like me feel a little more intelligent. Thanks to all. Just sharing a little caution.

If I can't read it, I am through with it. Most of you probably already knew this, but maybe a word of caution might help someone.

Few more attempts - and it worked. Thanks...ignore previous comment.

Is that me only? I can't register the software....

OS - Windows 8
More than enough disk space
Installing as Administartor

It just does not register - uninstalled and installed several times by now!

This software still had errors in reading a PDF which was created from a Word Processor (Open Office), in other words it wasn't a PDF created from a scanned document which could be aligned improperly. The font was Times New Roman. Further, it also had difficulty reading italicized Times New Roman. Unfortunately, a human will have a better chance of understanding all the words in this case.

It would help if the registration worked as advertized. I tried pasting in the number given at least 5 times. It restarted itself and, guess what, no registration ...

I am having the same difficulty as Rogerio D # 20. I also have Windows 7 Home. The registration will not stay activated after numerous restarts as administrator. Any suggestions from the techie gurus here would be greatly appreciated (pretty please :o)

I converted a 6 page pdf to rich text than to word 2000. I am quite impressed with the program. The pictures and diagrams I did not expect to ocr and found them to be rendered as garbled text. BUT in place. So very pleased with that. The results of the pdf text ocr is fantastic actually. Evey paragraph began on a new line though The paragraph spacing was not there. OK, so I put a return after each paragraph. I can live with that. Now, this pdf was about building mission furniture and it was full of fractions. Not a single fraction was misrepresented the inch marks (straight quotes) were all there. Lumber cut lists were just as the original. Page breaks, as would be expected were different than the original pdf due to the missing paragraph spacing and due to the fact that the font was different. So all in all I'm quite pleased with the program. I have tried much worse working ones said to be "wonders" and am quite thankful to the people making it possible for me to use their software. Thanks folks!
Pentium 4 280Ghz
2.79GHz 3.62G RAM
2- 75G Hard drives
Windows XP with all available Updates

I appreciate ALL reviews and thanks for the time and efforts. Biased or right-on are personal opinions and I would welcome ALL as different views. (even yours #24 although I don't quite agree.)

Nothing compares to Adobe Acrobat X Pro , Abbyy it`s a great soft to

Giovanni , Abbyy ScreenShot it not Abbyy FineReader like you Know

@#16 I have absolutely no problem with Ashraf getting people to his site. I subscribe to it and have found a huge amount of very useful information there, including his software reviews. If he makes a few bucks on it from wherever, I have no problem with that either. I've never felt that he was in any way deceptively biased, and if he does have a bias toward anything he lets the reader know up front. Same for any lack of knowledge on a specific topic covered on his site. And as for this software, I'll pass. I have a decent OCR already and I can type fast enough to fix most of the glitches I might encounter.

It converts my PDF file to text in WordPad. If you are willing to retype the original document to correct the numerous mistakes, apart from being unstructured compared to the original document, be my guest ! Even FREE it is not worth it... Sorry for my first comments on your otherwise valuable offers !

Reviewers are a valuable source of information for all of us. A great or merely good review still helps, So why are people now choosing sides is a Ashraf Vs Giovanni battle. C'mon. They both help with reviews. Lets not turn this site into a whiners convention.

Lower the price.

* Free Image OCR (==> Official website)
http://www.freepdfsoft.com/tour_imagepdfocr.html

Full tutorial:
http://www.freepdfsoft.com/hocr_01_how_to_extract_text_from_images_ocr.html
http://www.freepdfsoft.com/hocr_02_how_to_extract_text_from_scanned_pdf.html

I've opened a 6 page pdf and converted it to rich text than opened it in Word 2000. I was impressed at how little editing had to be done. Most all paragraphs had to have a paragraph space applied (return. Though I must say that all the paragraph breaks were true to the original. Any picture/diagrams were rendered as garbled text (in place though, not scattered all over the page. I was flat-out astounded however, by the programs capability to duplicate the many many fractions and even inch marks (straight quotes)that were in the text of this document. It didn't miss a single instance. Lumber cut lists were clear as the original lists and needed no editing what-so-ever. Of course page breaks differed from the original. But lets face it, different fonts used and the lack of paragraph spacing has to show such a difference. I did not expect pictures to be "OCR". So I for one find the program to be a keeper and my thanks to the providers for the chance to use their software.

#14:
Giovanni gives MUCH BETTER and MORE PRECISE REVIEWS.
Altho your designated reviewer shows promise, GIOVANNI is right on!

I have used FreeOCR for a while. It is also based on Tesseract and you have to scan each page of a pdf seperately, which can be a huge negative for multi-page file.

Pretty poor program I can say!! Extracting text from an image requires high skills and, as Ashraf rightly noticed in his precious review mentioned above, it requires proofreading as well once text is editable. Not a great deal for a PDF OCR.

THUMBS DOWN!!

But hey...why bother of OCR tools if you can do the same things and even more for FREE??

Here are the BEST two ones I know...Just pay attention while installing them because they are both ADSUPPORTED...

* Free Image OCR (==> My Personal First Choice)
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Free-Image-OCR.shtml

* PDFCore - Advanced PDF Utilities Free
http://www.pdfcore.com

To convert your scanned documents directly into the PDF format you can also use this free tool (Adsupported as well....same as first tool above!!):

http://www.freepdfsoft.com/tour_scantopdf.html

See also:
http://www.onlineocr.net
http://www.free-ocr.com
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-free-ocr-tools-convert-files-editable-documents

Oh, somebody mentioned the award-winning ABBYY...right?

Dudes...it costs $$$$$$$$$$$$$...

but...hey....

http://www.abbyyonline.com/en/home/ocrterminal

That's not all...

....Abra Cadabra.....

e voilà...Russian Promo for ABBYY SCREENSHOT READER...LOL!!

http://www.abbyy.ru/promo/ny-2013/download

Hurry up!!

Enjoy!!

My 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002 cents for today's giveaway!!!!

I have installed in my W7 Home Basic, it asked for the code, said it was succesfully registered, asked to restart the program and after I did ... asked again for the registration when asked to OCR some PDF. I have tried this twice.

Free PDF X-Change reader has built-in OCR, available in overlay mode, so that when you do a text search, the results are highlghted.

From developer's site: "Besides English, PDF OCR Also supports German, French, Spanish, Italian and many Languages else." As it does not work with my language (Lithuanian), there's no use from this pprogram yet for me, sorry...

Those critical of Ashraf's review have obviously never tried this product nor are they familiar with gImageReader.

OCR is not a perfect art and, sadly, this program bears witness to that statement.

#1 Ashraf from dotTech is only trying to drive traffic to his site. Why do you think the final verdit is not published here.
gimage reader is good but it is also avaible at sourceforge.net/projects/gimagereader at other sites.
PDF OCR works fine for me.

I've been using PDF-XChange Viewer free version for a long time. It's a Pdf reader that allows you to edit and OCR Pdf documents.

http://www.tracker-software.com/product/downloads

Let's stop picking on Ashraf.

His contributions are very valuable in evaluating the software offered here.
He's one of our top gurus, and it benefits us all with added expert opinion.

We're lucky he's back, offering his time and expertise.
If he benefits in some small way by a click or two, what's the issue?
The Net is built on click-throughs. The clicker doesn't pay for anything.

Add to that he's quite thorough, while usually right.
He spends a lot of time and effort doing what he does for us.

The weakness in this software is sure to be its character recognition capability. OCR is a very complex technology to master. I will pass this time..

Thanks

-JC

Re #10: I wrote "No OCR needed" because no OCR is needed when transforming a unscanned pdf to a doc. It was NOT something noted by either of the two programmes I used. It was something I wrote for the readers here.

In this case I could have recovered the text using Acrobat Reader. But when a programme fails in this case ...

On my site (in Dutch) you can see the output in English of both programmes. You can download the pdf I used for testing.

@2 - Stone-caster
I'm not sure if this is still going on, but some time ago, Ashraf commented about it, that he would receive a pre-anounced GAOTD information telling him of what software would be released on the next GAOTD. With this, he would have enough time to make a review, so when we would receive the e-mail with the software, the review would be already there. But they would not release the actual software for him, so he used to get whatever free version he could find of the software and would review that one. It could happen that the GAOTD version released was not the same that he reviewed, but still we could have a clue of what the software was. So I think this is still going on. Which is OK for me!

I tested out this program with a PDF document that is typical of many of the scanned PDF files I work with each day. For comparison, Wondershare’s program mangled it. In an email they wrote “Due to the complex layout of your PDF file, our product cannot recognize the characters in it.” So, I checked PDF OCR 4.3. Am sorry to report that the conversion wasn’t any better.

@gergn (#6) - Is it possible that you got "No OCR Needed" because you were trying to OCR a text-based PDF file?

This program is intended to recognized text in images. OCR is not needed for files containing actual text characters.

@#3
"@ #1 – gImageReader is only a 14 day free trial. Your recommendation is misleading.
Comment by Terry — January 2nd, 2013 at 3:26 am"

No it's not. gImageReader is Free, fully functioning OPEN SOURCE under GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3), Tesseract is also open source, check your facts before posting comments.

@ #3 I don't think an open-sourced project is a share-ware.

@#3 about an alleged time limit on gImageReader
quoted from http://gimagereader.sourceforge.net/

"Of benefit to users, Open Source software is licensed so you can download and use the software free-of-charge."

Sorry but it seems your comment is misleading.

This program failed completely when used on a pdf I downloaded from the supplier of a gadget. Note: NO OCR needed!

ABBYY PDFTransformer 3 did work well, because it recognisses text areas automatically. See my site for a comparison.

#2 Go down to the bottom as stated in the write up. What you clicked on and Ashraf wants you to click on, is a "For Sale" program with a "Free Download" not free program. Ashraf gets paid for every time he sends a GOTD customer to another site. He is using GOTD to promote his site and make money off of the people who click on other links. It does clearly state that the two programs you need are at the bottom of his extensive write up. Note that you need both programs at the bottom if you did not read it.

At least they are honest to admit: "So PDF OCR cannot recognize text 100% correct, but we are still working on improving the program."
However, the amount of time needed to proofread the result and correcting the mistakes is what makes the difference between a good OCR program (like Abbye) and a mediocre one. I am afraid this one belongs to the latter category.

@ #1 - gImageReader is only a 14 day free trial. Your recommendation is misleading.

Oh look, Ashraf is commenting on a different version again. GOTD is offering us PDF OCR 4.3, Ashraf reviewed PDF OCR 4.1.

Personally, I think this is an okay program. Not great, not awful, just okay. I had no trouble with page breaks, and extracting text from images worked as well as anything else I've tried.

Pros
*Intuitive interface that is simple for almost everyone to figure out
*Can be used as a standard PDF viewer
*Allows you to extract text from PDF files -- quickly converts text in a PDF document into an editable text document

Cons
*Page breaks do not seem to be recognized during conversion
*Hit-or-miss conversion quality. Had difficulty extracting text from images like the program promises. Only clear and easy-to-read text was converted properly into an editable document, and even that text needs to be proofread, because the program still makes multiple mistakes
*Extremely resource hungry (at times it was using 80% of my computer's resources during conversion)

Free Alternatives
gImageReader (not specific to PDFs but an OCR program nonetheless)

Final Verdict
Click here for final verdict and full review