Are there any portable OCR program out there?

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henrik
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Are there any portable OCR program out there?

#1 Post by henrik »

Well, the question is in the subject. Does any one know of a portable OCR program?

lady_morana
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Joined: Fri Apr 25, 2008 4:39 pm

portable OCR

#2 Post by lady_morana »

I am wanting a portabel OCR. Something that will read just about anything on the screen such as an open PDF.

appsuser
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#3 Post by appsuser »

This question's already been asked in the forums. Do a search on "OCR" on the main web page and you'll come up with the forum topics and a portable OCR program already in the portable freeware database.

Unless you're looking for something more specific (feature-wise) that isn't there...?

I'm thinking any type of editor or reader program, such as one for PDF, would work better than an OCR program for extracting text not being scanned. From what I've read, OCR programs have a hard time with low-res (such as screen graphic) images.

opsimathic
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#4 Post by opsimathic »

appsuser wrote:This question's already been asked in the forums. Do a search on "OCR" on the main web page and you'll come up with the forum topics and a portable OCR program already in the portable freeware database.

Unless you're looking for something more specific (feature-wise) that isn't there...?
The standard quick reply (brusquely worded) is not always the most helpful response. The portable OCR program already in The Portable Freeware database (Softi FreeOCR V1.5) appears from the comments to be lame, at best, and quite possible useless - I have not been able to make it work for me under VISTA. Whether or not the OP did a search, the question of finding a workable OCR program still remains. So, yes I am looking for more specific features - namely that it works with a least a minimum level of functionality.

The only possible alternative I have found is at www.topocr.com which I run locally from a USB stick (I think I used the install - copy - uninstall technique) but I don't know if it is truly portable or stealthy - someone with better tech skills than I possess may wish to evaluate it.

Does anyone know of any alternatives?

Thanks.
/opsimathic

M@tty
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#5 Post by M@tty »

opsimathic wrote:The only possible alternative I have found is at www.topocr.com which I run locally from a USB stick (I think I used the install - copy - uninstall technique) but I don't know if it is truly portable or stealthy - someone with better tech skills than I possess may wish to evaluate it.
Already has been covered in this thread: http://portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2482

Check out Queue's wrapper and my UPX-compressed package, they should do the trick for you.

appsuser
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#6 Post by appsuser »

opsimathic wrote: The standard quick reply (brusquely worded) is not always the most helpful response.
No offense. I wouldn't have taken the time to reply if I didn't think my response would be helpful. A quick search for "OCR" does reveal all the forum topics that address this, including M@tty's thread above. I asked if the OP was looking for something more specific just in case my response wasn't helpful, so that I or other posters could try to answer all of their concerns. I think everyone posting in these forums shares a common interest with everyone else and is just trying to be helpful.

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Queue
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Re: portable COR

#7 Post by Queue »

lady_morana wrote:...such as an open PDF.
Is it PDFs in particular that you want to get text from? If so, is it because you're dealing with locked PDFs where you can't print, copy, edit, etc.?

The reason I ask is because I just dealt with this issue yesterday. I was sent a PDF that had no user password so could be viewed freely but had an owner password and high restriction so it couldn't be printed. The solution I found was pdfcrypt:
http://www.esnips.com/web/PDFTools?docsPage=2#files

It's a command-line utility based on the iText java libraries. It's a freaking huge executable (24 MB uncompressed, 6 MB after UPX) because it is basically GCJ-compiled java code; it does work without any java framework and such though.

Anyhow, the following command should remove the restrictions from a PDF file that has no user password but does have an owner password:
pdfcrypt.exe input_pdf_file.pdf output_pdf_file.pdf decrypt ""
The quotation marks indicate a blank password and are required. Another option would be:
pdfcrypt.exe input_pdf_file.pdf output_pdf_file.pdf encrypt "" "" 11111111 40

The reason it can do this, is the iText library simply reads in the PDF with user permissions then writes a new PDF based on the file it read in (disregarding any owner permissions the original PDF had).

After you've created an unlocked copy of the PDF, you should be able to select text to copy in any standard PDF viewer.

Queue

opsimathic
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#8 Post by opsimathic »

[quote="M@tty "Already has been covered in this thread: http://portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2482

Check out Queue's wrapper and my UPX-compressed package, they should do the trick for you.[/quote]

Thanks - I'll check that out and I appreciate being pointed to a specific place for additional help. Much appreciated.

/opsimathic

opsimathic
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#9 Post by opsimathic »

appsuser wrote:
opsimathic wrote: The standard quick reply (brusquely worded) is not always the most helpful response.
No offense. I wouldn't have taken the time to reply if I didn't think my response would be helpful. A quick search for "OCR" does reveal all the forum topics that address this, including M@tty's thread above. I asked if the OP was looking for something more specific just in case my response wasn't helpful, so that I or other posters could try to answer all of their concerns. I think everyone posting in these forums shares a common interest with everyone else and is just trying to be helpful.
Thank you for your gentle response to my pi$$y comments! Sorry for my over reaction.

/opsimathic

ashghost
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For the best free PDF OCR

#10 Post by ashghost »

If uploading to a website is not a problem, Zamzar's (zamzar.com) online document conversion gives better results than any application I've tried. You can convert PDF to doc, html, text, rtf, odt and more.

It's the only converter/OCR program I've found that properly handled PDF's with multiple columns of text.

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webfork
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Re: Are there any portable OCR program out there?

#11 Post by webfork »

Old thread update:

Did some tests on the three that are on the site:
  1. PDF XChange Viewer with OCR plugin - Recommended. At least as good as many commercial tools I've used. Note that you'll have to convert images over to PDF, which can also be done with some portable tools: FastStone can batch convert and PDFTK Builder will combine many PDFs into one document (Docx2rtf would also probably work).
  2. IrfanView with OCR plugin - works pretty well, good for quickly pulling words from a screencap or other image.
  3. SoftiFree OCR - doesn't work if the document isn't very high quality.

Hydaral
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Re: Are there any portable OCR program out there?

#12 Post by Hydaral »

webfork wrote: [*]SoftiFree OCR - doesn't work if the document isn't very high quality.[/list]
Actually I did some tests with this and it doesn't have to be high quality, it just has to be big, I know, it's odd.

I made myself an Irfanview script to convert images, I found these were the best settings:

Code: Select all

/resample /resize=(200p,200p) /resize=(200p,200p) /bpp=1
Yes, I double the size and then double it again. :) This works out better than just quadrupling it, then I convert to black and white.

donald
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Re: Are there any portable OCR program out there?

#13 Post by donald »

Do any portable (automated) OCR programs support Chinese Language :?:

Retyping Chinese is problematic at best for a non speaker,
so using OCR and copy paste would be great.

I found a program COCR2 that could be portable (The website claims no registry modification) but ...

COCR2 is not automated as it lacks the ability to segment text into separate characters without user input.

Edit*************************************

Download Here

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webfork
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Re: Are there any portable OCR program out there?

#14 Post by webfork »

donald wrote:Do any portable (automated) OCR programs support Chinese Language
Think this might do the trick.

donald
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Re: Are there any portable OCR program out there?

#15 Post by donald »

The results were not as good as English OCR.

Also manually converting with COCR2 produced better results probably owing to manual segmentation of text.

Though it could just be the text I chose for the test.

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