The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

New version V2.5.196 - June 30, 2011

http://www.tracker-software.com/product ... nge-viewer

Anyone else notice their changelog never shows the current version?

PDF-XChange Viewer now has picture-to-text capabilities, also known as "optical character recognition" (OCR).

1. Visit the Download site http://www.tracker-software.com/product ... nge-viewer
2. Check “Portable Version (OCR Lang Files) | 8 MB”
3. Click Download Now
4. Extract the folder inside “ocrdats” into the application directory

A PDF help file is available from this same web page.

The OCR is not as good as for example for example ABBYY FineReader 11 (not freeware) but in testing dramatically better than Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional. As such, this is a big win for freeware and we're really lucky the X-Change team put this in the free version.

Note: some documents will not accept OCR conversion with the default "Preserve Original Content & Add Text Layer". Still, this option is much faster, so it is recommended trying this first and then "Convert Image Content to Image Only -- Add Text as a Layer" option.

• Thanks to Bruce who pointed this out in comments.
• Last updated Nov, 2015.

I tried the PDF-XChange PDF Viewer's OCR function using the free version which I downloaded in the last quarter of 2012 and it wasn't bad but in my experience at least for English only OCR it was not as good as even older Adobe Acrobat Pro or ABBYY FineReader Pro9 (dedicated ocr package).

1. quite a lot of characters ended up being interpreted as 'illegal' (gibberish - unicode?) characters under XP, SP3 - or at least, that's how they appeared when for instance copying the text layer from pdf to notepad to inspect results;

2. it doesn't seem to rotate landscape pages to try OCRing them; and

3. offers no means of reviewing cases of marginal recognition accuracy.

This was on the basis of a pdf compiled from good quality Grp4 b&w TIFFs preprocessed using ScanTailor.

A month or two ago I was informed that the Free OCR included with the Free PDF-XChange Viewer "will be surpassed in functionality with the release of a planned licensed OCR plugin for the the new PDF-XChange Editor later this year after the Editor is released in March". I haven't followed up to ascertain whether the OCR engine in the free version stayed the same or would be the same component as in the forecast superior PRO version, but I note for the freebie, Current Version is now 2.5.210 (Updated on 5 Mar 2013) at:

http://www.tracker-software.com/

-- I have not tested the latest version to see if the shortcomings listed above still prevail.

Tripod wrote:A month or two ago I was informed that the Free OCR included with the Free PDF-XChange Viewer "will be surpassed in functionality with the release of a planned licensed OCR plugin for the the new PDF-XChange Editor later this year after the Editor is released in March". I haven't followed up to ascertain whether the OCR engine in the free version stayed the same or would be the same component as in the forecast superior PRO version, but I note for the freebie, Current Version is now 2.5.210 (Updated on 5 Mar 2013) at:

Didn't see anything on that at the link you provided. Source?

Extracted from email they sent me in response to my feature request sent over their website.

hi
if i buy the pro version and copy the exe in the portable folder
is there still stealth?

thanks

Sorry I didn't answer this sooner ...

giulia wrote:if i buy the pro version and copy the exe in the portable folder
is there still stealth?

Unknown. We'd have to buy a copy (or get one from the company) and test it. They may be just the same as the standard copy or they might include some anti-piracy "features" and write stuff to the registry.