Monday, October 22, 2007

SimonS SQL Server Stuff : OCR for free from any image = PDF to Text

Yet another reason to use One Note... OCR from any image. 

OCR for free from any image

There are always features of products that you never now about. It is rare to go on training courses and so its up to you and your favourtie search engine to find out what a product does.

Onenote is a product I like. I'm not nuts about it but it is useful. One feature that I've always loved is the screen clipping feature. You always see users doing ALT+PRINT SCREEN to get a screen print, and then pasting into word and emailing 2Mb word documents with screen captures in them. The One Note feature allows you to not only select the section of the screen you want but also the file sizes aren't huge.

Its was my favourite feature until I found a new feature.

Image to Text.

Yes in Onenote you can copy the text from an image. I'm using it at the moment to convert screen captures I have from a terminal system to the text.

Simply this is OCR for free, out of the box. It also supports multiple languages.

To use the feature, paste an image into onenote, then select "Make Text in Image Searchable" and then select "Copy Text from Picture" and heh presto you have the text from the picture in the clipboard

SimonS SQL Server Stuff : OCR for free from any image

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