Any program to pull text from images?

[ChrisIsBored]

I have some scanned documents that i'm right now having to convert to Word format. One of the upcoming documents is 35+ pages though and I don't think i'm going to like typing all that out.

Are there any programs that can read from a .jpg image (the papers were scanned) and then let me edit the text?

 

[notfred]

I beleive the full versionof Adobe Acrobat comes with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that will do that. Last time I tried software like that, it was far from perfect, though.

 

[kranky]

Like notfred mentioned, you need a program that does OCR. If you scanned them at a decent resolution and there's good contrast and no funky fonts, you might be 90%+ done.

 

[ChrisIsBored]

Any other cheap programs that will work? Full Adobe Acrobat is a bit expensive

 

[manly]

The two preeminent OCR packages are OmniPage Pro and ABBYY FineReader. ABBYY is a bit cheaper. If you're lucky, they'll have an evaluation download?

From published reports, both are pretty accurate if the scanned source is 600 dpi.

There are other OCR packages out there, but for the most part this software category has consolidated into two players. OCR and the paperless office never really caught on as some people expected.