I used a few different online OCR services to get a high-quality copy of the document before burning it.
- Google Sheets: This site is great for data entry and is free to use. You can create a spreadsheet with any number of sheets, add images, text, and more. 2.PDF Creator: This site is great for creating PDF documents. You can choose between a basic free service or a paid option that offers more features.
- OCR Wizard: This site is great for OCRing text and images. You can choose between a free or paid service that offers different options like larger images, multiple input languages, etc.
Most of these services won’t be able to match the formatting of your original document. These are mainly for extracting text and that’s it. If you need everything to be in a specific layout or format, you’ll have to manually do that once you get all the text from the OCR.
If you want to get the best results from your documents with a 200 to 400 DPI resolution, you’ll need to use documents with a higher resolution.
I tested a lot of different online OCR services, but several of the top 10 results didn’t work. If you search for free online OCR, you’ll find a lot of sites, but some of the top 10 results didn’t even complete the conversion. Some services would time out, other would give errors, and some just got stuck on the “converting” page. I didn’t bother testing those services.
The first document is a resume for a new job. The second document is a resume for an old job. The results of my tests are as follows: -The resume for the new job was well-converted to the website. -The resume for the old job was not well-converted to the website.
In case you want to see what the images looked like that I used for my test, I have attached them here: Test1 and Test2. Note that these are not the full resolution versions of the images taken from the phone. I used the full resolution image when uploading to the sites.
OnlineOCR
The site is easy to use and delivered good results in my onlineOCR.net test. The ads are not too overwhelming and the site is very clean. Overall, I would recommend this service to anyone looking for an onlineOCR solution.
To upload a file, select it from your computer and click the “upload” button. The max upload size for this site is 100 MB. If you register for a free account, you get a few extra features like the bigger upload size, multi-page PDFs, different input languages, more conversions per hour, etc. ..
Next, choose your input language and then choose the output format. You can choose from Word, Excel, or Plain Text. Click the Convert button and you’ll see the text displayed at the bottom in a box along with a download link.
If you want to read the document, copy and paste it from the box. However, I suggest you download the Word document because it does a surprisingly great job of keeping the layout of the original document.
I was surprised to find that the document included a table with three columns, just like in the image.
This site is great for converting a lot of traffic.
OnlineOCR was able to successfully identify the text in both of the test documents. ..
When you open these documents on your computer, you’ll get a message in Word stating that it’s from the Internet and editing has been disabled. That’s perfectly OK because Word doesn’t trust documents from the Internet and you don’t have to enable editing if you just want to view the document.
i2OCR
If you’re looking for a good way to convert your text files into PDFs, i2OCR is a great option. The process is very similar: choose your language, file, and then press Extract Text. ..
You’ll have to wait a minute or two here because this site takes a bit longer. Also, in Step 2, make sure that your image is showing right-side up in the preview, otherwise you’ll get a bunch of gibberish as output. For some reason, the images from my iPhone were showing in portrait mode on my computer, but landscape when I uploaded to this site. ..
I had to open the image in a photo editing app, rotate it 90 degrees, then rotate it back to portrait and then save it again. Once complete, scroll down and it’ll show you a preview of the text along with a download button.
This site fared pretty well with the output for the first test, but didn’t do so well with the second test that had the column layout. Here are the results from i2OCR: Test1 Doc and Test2 Doc.
FreeOCR
We will take your images and convert them into plain text. It does not have an option to export to Word format. Choose your file, select a language and then click Start.
The text file is available for download immediately. Simply click the link to access it. ..
This site capitalizes all the T’s in the document. I have no idea why it would do that, but for some odd reason this site and NewOCR both did this. It’s not a big deal to change it, but it’s a tedious process you really shouldn’t have to do.
The results from FreeOCR are as follows: Test1 Doc is a text document, while Test2 Doc is a image document.
ABBYY FineReader Online
To use FineReader Online, you need to register for an account and get a free trial of the service. If you only need to do a one-time OCR for a couple of pages, then you can use this service. Make sure that you click the verify link in the confirmation email after you register. ..
This site is designed to help you recognize people and objects in photos and videos. It has a clean interface and no ads.
In my tests, this site was able to grab the text from the first test document, but it was absolutely enormous when I opened the Word doc, so I ended up doing it again and choosing Plain Text as the output format.
The document in FineReader was empty and could not handle paragraphs.
NewOCR
The first site was great, but the next site is much worse. Firstly, it has ads, but thankfully not a ton. Secondly, it’s not as good as the first site.
You can rotate the image and adjust the area where you want to scan for text. It’s like how the scanning process works on a computer with an attached scanner.
If the document has multiple columns, you can check the Page layout analysis button and it will try to split the text up into columns. Click the OCR button, wait a few seconds for it to complete and then scroll down to the bottom when the page refreshes. ..
The first test correctly capitalized every T in the document, but the second test with page analysis enabled got most of the text, but the layout was completely off. ..
The results from NewOCR are as follows: Test1 Doc and Test2 Doc.
Conclusion
The second site mentioned is not as good as the first, but it does a better job of recognizing all the text and retaining the format of the original document.
Most of the websites above can provide you with text. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy! ..
