Can OCR software read straight from an image file?

[Wedge1]

At work, I am receiving tif documents containing data that would best serve me in a spread-sheet format. I was hoping you guys might offer some guidance.

1. Can OCR software take a tif image and translate the image into alpha-numeric characters?

2. If so, which would you recommend?

3. If anybody has a better idea, I'm open to suggestions.

 

[MadRat]

I believe Office 2003 has tiff scan ability built in. But then again you're not asking much from standard OCR software these days.

 

[KayGee]

I don't have OCR software like Omnipage, so what I would do is use something like pdf995 to convert the TIF files to PDF and then simply copy the text from the PDFs into a spreadsheet.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: KayGee
I don't have OCR software like Omnipage, so what I would do is use something like pdf995 to convert the TIF files to PDF and then simply copy the text from the PDFs into a spreadsheet.

I highly doubt PDF995 is going to OCR the TIF image during conversion. More than likely it will copy the bitmap into the PDF file as-is.

 

[KayGee]

Originally posted by: MrChad

Originally posted by: KayGee
I don't have OCR software like Omnipage, so what I would do is use something like pdf995 to convert the TIF files to PDF and then simply copy the text from the PDFs into a spreadsheet.

I highly doubt PDF995 is going to OCR the TIF image during conversion. More than likely it will copy the bitmap into the PDF file as-is.

Oops, you're right. 😱 I actually faced a similar problem and posted here for help and OCR was the only solution.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=33&threadid=2075657

I must be getting old. 😛

 

[MadRat]

There is an online version of Google's Tesseract. If you want Tesseract in a packaged form try FreeOCR. Otherwise try Simple OCR. All of these examples are freeware.

Online sites:
http://appsv.ocrgrid.org/tesseract/
http://asv.aso.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp/tesseract/

 

[Wedge1]

Thanks.

Tried FreeOCR. Boy did that not work.

The free onlinceOCR doesn't recognize .tif files.

 

[MadRat]

Sorry, I was actually posting that last comment for KayGee's sake. 🙂