OCR or Optical Character Recognition is a sophisticated software technique that allows a computer to extract text from images. In the early days OCR software was pretty rough and unreliable. Now, with the tons of computing power on tap, it’s often the fastest way to convert text in an image into something you can edit with a word processor.
These ten applications offer different takes on the task of OCR, without a price tag and across multiple platforms. If you’ve been looking for a way to turn pictures into words, you’ll almost certainly find the best free ocr software you need below.
FreeOCR (Windows 10)
FreeOCR is a basic free OCR software that offers all the core functionality you’d want from this type of software. For starters, if you have a TWAIN scanner (which is basically all of them) you can directly scan and extract text from paper. Image imports work as you’d expect as well. This includes multi-page documents in TIFF and PDF format as well.
Sep 18, 2013 Despite the lack of a built-in editor or image-correction tools, still the best OCR available on the Mac. Pros The most accurate OCR engine available, in the simplest possible OCR interface. Find the best OCR Software for Mac. Compare product reviews and features to build your list. See all OCR Software. All Products; Sort by: Why Capterra is Free. Monthly Subscription. Annual Subscription. One-Time License. Popular Features. Convert to PDF.
FreeOCR uses an Open Source engine originally developed by Hewlett Packard and eventually released by Google for everyone to use. It’s known as “Tesseract”. Tesseract has some neat features, but one of the most interesting is its automatic layout detection system. This means you don’t need to spend time tediously drawing rectangles around discrete blocks of text.
SimpleOCR (Windows 10)
SimpleOCR is a basic OCR package that can convert typed documents into text, directly from your scanner. The name, SimpleOCR, is quite literal in this case. If you have documents that exhibit any form of complexity, such as columns or that don’t have perfectly crisp scans, SimpleOCR can’t get the job done.
Of course, Simple Software is happy to sell you a more sophisticated solution for a few bucks, but if you just want to OCR some standard blocks of text, this is one option that won’t cost you a penny and is as simple to use as the name suggests. As a bonus, it supports handwriting recognition!
Easy Screen OCR (Windows, Mac, iOS & Android)
Easy Screen OCR is a small, best free OCR software that relies on a cloud-based, Google-powered recognition engine. As you might expect, this means that you need to have an active internet connection for the software to work. If that’s not an issue, you’ll find quite a useful tool here.
This OCR application is intended to extract text from screenshots, letting you copy text from websites or any other text that’s on-screen. What’s particularly cool about this is the support for more than 100 languages. If you want to translate (for example) Japanese text, you can simply take a screenshot and have Easy Screen OCR do it for. If this is something you need to do often, it also helps that you have the option to set custom hotkeys.
While this is not a traditional OCR application, there are plenty of workflows around these days that involve extracting text from the images you’re working with. Easy Screen OCR makes that task as easy as a few keystrokes.
Unfortunately the latest version of the software (1.4.2 and up) requires a subscription fee after 20 uses. However, older versions of the software are still free to use.
Capture2Text (Windows 10)
Capture2Text is an interesting little application with a narrow, but very useful function. It’s used to OCR text from what’s currently on your screen. You press a hotkey, select the zone of the screen you want to OCR and then it sends the result directly to the clipboard, so you can paste it into a word processor.
Capture2Text is a portable application, so you don’t need to install it. Just run the executable and you can use it on any Windows system from version 7 and up. The software is Open Source as well, so you can copy and modify it as you like, as long as you comply with the terms of the GNU license.
It’s not fancy by any means, but if you want to rapidly grab text from images that you are handling, this is a great piece of software to do it.
A9t9 (Windows 10)
If you’ve never ventured onto the Windows Store, you may be surprised to find that there are actually plenty of free and Open Source applications there. The a9t9 app is just such a gem and comes with no strings attached at all. There are no adverts and it promises pretty robust OCR performance.
A9t9 supports quite a long list of languages, although not as extensive as some of the other options on this list. If you’re a Windows 8.1 (or up) user who needs OCR right now and don’t want to spend any money, then simply click a single button on the Windows Store app and seconds later a9t9 will be processing your images into documents you can edit.
Adobe Scan (Android & iOS)
Adobe has an absolute ton of mobile apps out in the wild. Some are pretty great, while many seem to be little more than experiments. Adobe Scan falls into the former category. It’s a polished camera scanning and OCR application that will run on either Android or iOS. There’s no charge and you don’t need to be subscribed to any Adobe services.
Of course, the final document is a PDF, which you can only directly edit with a paid version of Acrobat, but copying the text over to a word processor of your choice is no hassle, if we’re being honest.
One of the best features of the Adobe OCR software is its ability to recognize handwriting. Of course, good quality handwriting will be better recognized. Don’t expect it to decipher something you can’t read yourself. Like your doctor’s prescription notes.
There are a few other reasons to try out Adobe Scan. The ability to automatically scan, OCR and contacts from a business card is very cool. In fact, if you spend a lot of time meeting people, it could save you a heck of a lot of time.
The app also has, as you’d expect from the creators of PhotoShop, a small set of touch-up tools. So you can clean up the images before trying to extract text from them.
Office Lens (Android & iOS)
When the first phones with built-in digital cameras came to market the quality on offer was truly awful. The resulting images weren’t really useful for anything and you certainly couldn’t make out fine detail such as text.
Today, the sophisticated cameras found on even budget models offer high-resolution images that are good enough to use as a replacement for a document scanner. For example, the Google Drive app lets you make some pretty good scans using nothing but your phone camera.
The Office Lens app by Microsoft not only lets you scan documents, it allows you to OCR them on the fly. So you could take a snap of someone’s business card and immediately have the text ready to copy into your contacts list.
Office Lens is a standalone application, but its functionality is being built into other MS Office apps as well, so if you’re already using those it may not be necessary to download this independent app. Then again, sometimes a focused, lightweight app is exactly what the doctor ordered.
English OCR (iOS)
Top mac project management software. English OCR is a free OCR app for iPhone and iPad that makes it pretty easy to quickly take a snap of a document and convert the text in the photo into a digital format. It’s released under an Open Source licence, but the developers use adverts to help carry the costs of developing and supporting the application.
There is a paid “Pro” version that has exactly the same functionality as the free edition. The only difference is that the Pro version removes all adverts. So if you are OK with a few ads, you don’t need to put any money down at all.
Reading Between The Lines
The promise of a paperless world has, so far, failed to materialize. Which means OCR technology will remain an important part of the bridge between the digital and analogue worlds.
Armed with the OCR apps above, you should never have to laboriously retype a document ever again and, best of all, they won’t cost you a cent.
Free OCR Software for Mac – OCR Software for Macintosh:
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. You need an OCR Software for Mac to convert scanned images & documents into editable text formats. Whether it is your business agreement or purchase/sale invoices, you can scan them on Mac to get in digital format. Thereafter you need to convert them to PDF, text or other format for editing purposes. An OCR Software for Mac is useful to extract text from Image & PDF and convert them to searchable PDF or text documents.
Contents
- 1 Best Free OCR Software for Mac
Best Free OCR Software for Mac
There are many OCR Software available for Mac OS, some software are free and some are paid. It is really tough to know which OCR software for Mac you should choose. Because the accuracy of OCR software is more important than other features and design. We have conducted a research to find out some best and free OCR software for Mac, such software list is mentioned below:
- PDF OCR X Community Edition
- Microsoft OneNote OCR
- OCR Documents in Google Drive
- LEADTOOLS OCR App
- Evernote App
- Tesseract OCR
- OCR.Space
- Online OCR
- Convertio OCR
- OCRmyPDF
Let us discuss each of the above OCR Software for Mac in detail and explain their features to know which software is suitable for you.
01. PDF OCR X Community Edition
PDF OCR X Community Edition is a free OCR Software for Mac System. This app is developed by the Web Line Solutions Corporation to help the Mac users. You can convert scanned document and image files to text documents and searchable PDF formats.
PDF OCR X Community Edition has a simple drag and drop feature to quickly convert the scanned files into editable text formats. You must have the scanned file in PDF or image format to use PDF OCR X App and convert them into an editable format.
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PDF OCR X App uses advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to extract the text from PDF even if that text is contained in an image. It supports more than 60 languages including English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Japanese and many others.
02. Microsoft OneNote OCR
OneNote is a digital notebook application developed by Microsoft Corporation. It is useful to create your own notes for personal and business purposes. In addition, Microsoft OneNote also works for converting images files to searchable documents or text files. You can easily insert the PDF, Picture or File Attachment to OneNote and copy text from picture to get your file in an editable format.
OneNote allows the user to create, edit, save and share notes through various platforms and devices. It supports picture, PDF document and attachment files for OCR procedure. You can use OneDrive or SharePoint to access your notes from iPhone, iPad and other devices.
You can instantly extract text from an image by using “Copy text from picture” option in OneNote. The converted files will be in editable formats and searchable PDF for your convenience to edit and prepare it as per your requirement.
03. OCR Documents in Google Drive
Google Drive is a web storage service provided by Google. But very few people know that Google Drive also contains OCR feature. With the help of Google Drive OCR Feature, You can convert any image or PDF file into an editable document. This service is available for free to all the users who have signed into their Google Account and have a working internet connection.
Upload multiple document, image files to Google Drive and open them with Google Docs to convert them to editable text files. It is the easiest way to OCR documents on Mac without using any OCR software.
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Google Drive automatically detects document language and it supports JPEG, PNG, GIF and PDF formats. After conversion, it will retain the bold, italics, font size, font type and line breaks of the text.
04. LEADTOOLS OCR App
LEADTOOLS OCR App is best free OCR Software for Mac Users. It is a free application to perform optical character recognition on images. The OCR App by LEADTOOLS is developed by LEAD Technologies, Inc. for Mac OS X 10.10 or later. It can extract text from images and convert images to various document formats. It keeps superior accuracy and speed while extracting & copying text from and image for editing & sharing.
The OCR App by LEADTOOLS can convert and export images to various document formats such as PDF, DOCX, Text, SVG and many more. It can read Images in different languages in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.
LEADTOOLS OCR App offers various options to optimize text recognition, including Invert, Rotate, Image Binarization and Perspective Deskew. It provides fine tuned control over the OCR Engine Settings so that you can customize how your images are recognized.
05. Evernote App
Evernote is a multi-platform application developed by the Evernote Corporation. The Evernote App helps you to capture your ideas and projects. You can OCR images to convert them into searchable text formats. It is capable to extract text from typewritten and handwritten notes, photos of white boards, Post-It notes and to-do lists.
Evernote can identify 28 typewritten and 11 handwritten languages. You can choose which language to use from Recognition Language Setting. It can find words in handwritten notes, photos of white boards, Post-It notes and to-do lists that you scan into Evernote.
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Evernote provides Automatic Sync option that allows you to leave your work from Mac and continue the same on your iPhone or iPad. It can convert the PDF document and Image files to a text file or other document for editing purpose.
Best Free Mac Os Software
06. Tesseract OCR
Tesseract OCR is a free OCR Engine developed by Google for Mac OS, Windows and Linux. It was originally created by Ray Smith and Hewlett Packard. It is not an OCR App and therefore you cannot use it as you operate other OCR software on Mac. You have to open Command line interface on your Mac to use Tesseract OCR to convert an image file into text format.
In 2006, Tesseract OCR was declared as the most accurate OCR software available in market. It comes with more than 100 languages support including English, Afrikaans, Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and many more.
Tesseract is operated from command line interface and therefore it is very easy to use OCR engine for developers. If you are a developer, you can train Tesseract to recognize other languages.
07. OCR.Space
OCR.Space is a free online OCR tool powered by the OCR API. It can convert the images and PDF files into texts. You don’t need to download any app to use OCR.Space on your Mac computer. Just connect the Mac to internet and open Ocr.Space site in a web browser. You can also use the simple drag & drop feature to quickly extract text from image and see its overlay.
OCR.Space can convert PDF Document, JPG Image and PNG Image files to Searchable PDF with visible or invisible text layer. You can select OCR document language from the list of 24 languages supported by OCR.Space Online OCR Tool.
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The OCR.Space automatically detects the orientation of image and rotate the image if required before OCR conversion is processed. When DPI is low, you should turn on Auto Enlarge Content option. Turn on Receipt Scanning to recognize table from Image.
08. Online OCR
Online OCR is a free online OCR service with various languages support. You can easily extract text from PDF and Images with help of this Online OCR Software. In order to convert PDF or Image to Text Document, you will have to upload your file to OnlineOCR.Net. After uploading the file, you need to choose language, output format and finally give convert order to proceed.
Online OCR supports recognition of 46 languages such as English, Brazilian, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Korean, Spanish, Turkish and many more. You can upload any Image with maximum file size of 15 MB which is much higher than 2 MB or 5 MB limits by other OCR software.
The Online OCR is able to convert Image to Text for various input formats like PDF, TIF/TIFF, JPEG/JPG, BMP, PCX, PNG and GIF. You can convert your Image file into Word Document (docx), Excel Document (xlsx) and Plain Text (txt).
09. Convertio OCR
Convertio OCR is an online optical character recognition tool for Mac and other computer users. It is able to convert scanned documents and images to text and editable document formats. You can upload image or document from your Mac, Dropbox, Google Drive or paste the file link in URL option. Thereafter you need to select document language(s) and output format & settings to recognize it in Convertio OCR.
Convertio OCR supports various file formats such as PDF, JPG, BMP, GIF, JP2, JPEG, PBM, PCX, PGM, PNG, PPM, TGA, TIFF and WBMP. It can recognize various languages and it can recognize multiple languages in one image to convert it to editable text format.
You should install Convertio extension to your Mac Chrome Browser for using Convertio OCR Tool without visiting its website. Convert your Image File to 11 different formats including Word Document, Excel Workbook, PowerPoint Presentation, Searchable PDF, Text Document and others.
10. OCRmyPDF
Ocr Software Mac
OCRmyPDF is a free online tool for optical character recognition. It recognizes PDF document in more than 100 languages. You need to install OCRmyPDF tool on your Mac to use it for converting regular PDF files to searchable PDF files. It optimizes the input PDF files and produces files smaller in size than earlier. It keeps the exact resolution of original embedded images.
OCRmyPDF places OCR text accurately below the image to make the copy and paste easier for the Mac user. It can deskew the crooked PDF files to clean them before converting to searchable PDF/A files.
The OCRmyPDF keeps the exact resolution of embedded images to maintain their original quality and appearance after conversion. It recognizes more than 100 languages and also scales properly to handle files with thousands of pages.
Apple Ocr Software
Final Opinion:
Ocr On Mac
All the information mentioned above about Free OCR Software for Mac is true and fair. All OCR Tools and Software are working great on Mac computer. You should choose the OCR Software which is suitable to use and meets all your needs.