It's OK...easy to use, can edit the OCR results with a built-in text editor, thus enabling you to edit scanned PDF files without using Word or other third party text editors.

It also gives you the option to convert one single page, a range of pages, or the entire PDF file in batch mode (supports even the Italian Language ==> simply unbelievable:...LOL!)

As for conversion quality, I found it pretty GOOD with regard to TEXT, not so good when required to extract text from images.

But obviously if you are looking for a more professional OCR product (for instance an ABBYY OCR software) you have to spend some money!!!

Anyway, THUMBS UP from me!

BEST FREE ALTERNATIVES (most of them require you to pay attention during installation)

http://www.ocronline.com (==> Supports over 153 languages)
http://www.paperfile.net (==> It also uses the powerful Tesseract engine by Google like this GAOTD)
http://capture2text.sourceforge.net
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Free-Image-OCR.shtml
http://vietocr.sourceforge.net

Or just try this old version of ABBY Fine Reader (it does not support PDF files though):

http://forum.raymond.cc/threads/abbyy-finereader-5-0-pro-for-free.35458

And if you use Chrome:

http://projectnaptha.com

Finally to create a PDF file directly from scanned documents and images for FREE:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Free-Scan-to-PDF.shtml
http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/WinScan2PDF

Enjoy!! ^_^

Giovanni (King of Freebies)  –  9 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+166)

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Installed and registered without problems on a Win 8.1 Pro 64 bit system.

A (US) company without name and address, but a toll free phone number.

A resizable window opens, you can either scan a .pdf to text or an image to .pdf.

In the .pdf to .txt path, there are no options, but the OCR language and the output path is fixed to c:\PDFOCR_Output to where it simply not belongs.

In the image to .pdf task, you simply convert an image, you can change the default output c:\output to a more useful path, enter author, subject and keyword. That's it.

More interesting is the OCR. This program uses the free Tesseract-OCR, which claims is probably the most accurate open source OCR engine available. Tesseract is maintained by Google.
It is indeed simply a frontend to tesseract - but does not mention tesseract.

The OCR capabilities are quite good, not as good as the commercial program - but it has a quite unique feature, important for German users. You can change the recognition language to "Fraktur (old German)". To recognize fraktur belongs to the most difficult OCR tasks. The "Fraktur" OCR is astonishing good!

The tesseract engine does quite a good job with this.

I have uploaded two examples, which you can test easily by yourself. They are in german language:

This is from a book of Fanny Lewald, printed 1845
http://www.xup.to/dl,15640991/Seite_25.pdf/

And this side is from an old Hungarian cookbook, a book, which I use always for test purposes:

http://www.xup.to/dl,15441766/Seite_8..pdf/

A simple to use OCR program, for German "Fraktur" readers nearly a must.

I'll keep it for this reason.

Karl  –  9 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+142)

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If your PDF has text in columns, this OCR just reads across the page and jumbles the text up in the resulting text file - absolutely no use at all!

Steve  –  9 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+118)

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A program which chooses to install itself into a unique root folder by default, and uses yet another one as a fixed output folder? No thank you. Developers who are so cavalier about folder structures do not inspire any confidence in me.

Julia  –  9 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+42)

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#4 Giovanni
Your link to ABBY Fine Reader http://forum.raymond.cc/threads/abbyy-finereader-5-0-pro-for-free.35458 has modified the way it operates.
The top link used to go to the serial number and the lower link to download for the program itself. This has changed, ABBY themselves appear to have taken over this site and are using it as a promotion of their OCR engine.
In my opinion ABBY still make the best OCR engine so it is still worth trying to get a copy of their FineReader; the fact that this is an older version is probably not too important as I believe their OCR engine has not changed much.
Although it does not convert directly to PDF, OpenOffice or Libra Office will import the results from ABBY and then you can export them to PDF.

XP-Man  –  9 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+33)

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