Thanks go to rileybeebs on Twitter for bringing a simple-yet-effective OCR conversion tool from WiseTREND to my attention.
WiseTREND is an organization that, according to its website:
…provides a set of specific industry-tested Solutions, as well as customizable Software applications for OCR, Document Conversion and Data Capture projects.
I’ve written on FPPad before (Improve Your Paperless Document Searches) about applying OCR to each and every document captured with a scanner. Doing so allows document management and search programs to look inside documents and match keywords entered in a search query.
Adopting intelligent search for documents means no more wasted time digging though seemingly endless trees of subfolders on a company server in an attempt to find one elusive document that ended up being misfiled when it was captured in the first place.
To get good quality OCR that can process batches of documents or run immediately upon document capture, you’ll need to spend some money on applications such as Adobe Acrobat or ABBYY.
But what if you just need to run OCR on one document for free?
WiseTREND offers a service called OCR Cloud 2.0, and anyone can evaluate this service by emailing a document image (PDF, JPG, TIF, PNG, and BMP) to ocr@wisetrend.com. Several minutes later (my trial took 8 minutes), WiseTREND will email back a PDF that’s been OCRed and thus has searchable text. It’s very slick!
Now I don’t recommend using the free email trial to OCR sensitive documents (I sent a receipt from a recent lunch meeting), but it’s a handy resource for that odd file you want to OCR for future reference.
If you have feedback on WiseTREND or other similar providers, I’m interested in hearing from you. Feel free to leave comments below or contact me via email.
