OCR Practice - Text Extraction from PDF

The name "OCR" is an abbreviation of the first letters of the words "Optical Character Recognition". This is a general name for a type of program that allows you to scan printed documents and convert them into electronic documents. Read about how they work and when it is worth using them.

What is OCR and what is it used for?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the process of recognizing text in an image. OCR is useful if we want to process text from an image in any way:

 Copy the content of a scanned page;

 Translate the text from the photo;

 Scan receipt

OCR will also prove useful when we build a database of scanned documents that we would like to be able to search later.

How do OCR programs work?

OCR programs recognize characters and entire texts saved in graphic files (e.g. JPG, PNG). Then they transfer these texts to another application, e.g. a text document, or directly to an accounting program. They can be used for both scanned documents and those sent as a PDF file.

Using such a program saves time on rewriting data from the invoice to the accounting program, which will be especially important in larger companies, where a lot of these invoices are received every month.

OCR program for entering scanned documents

What is the OCR function for and what is it? The OCR tool is a function that allows optical character recognition from a PDF, JPG, JPEG, TFF, PNG file. The OCR function allows for preliminary, intelligent processing of data from a scanned image or PDF documents.

Thanks to intelligent data processing and initial entry into the ERP system, the work of accountants is optimized and shortened as much as possible. With OCR you can recognize the content of documents. The effectiveness of the OCR system is very high.

Thanks to advanced algorithms, OCR reduces errors caused by the human factor. Using the OCR function - scanning text from files and transferring them to the system, you will reduce the amount of work in your company consisting of time-consuming, manual data transfer.

The OCR program allows your employees to optimize their work in the ERP system and instead of entering documents, they only have to verify them after loading image files.

Tool review

1. SwifDoo PDF

SwifDoo PDF is a lightweight PDF viewer and editor. The application includes search functions with highlighting the first entry, zooming in and out, switching to full screen mode, as well as an interesting option to apply a built-in OCR tool. We can convert PDF to other formats such as PDF to DWG, PDF to JPG using its free online converters.

SwifDoo PDF also offers simple document conversion to HTML, IMG, PDF and other extensions and options to manage the documents. As for supported platforms, SwifDoo is available for Windows computers and as a mobile application for Android and iOS devices, and a completely-free Mac version is provided only recently.

2. Google Drive

Converting PDF and image files to text becomes incredibly easy with Google Drive OCR. Free Google Drive online OCR is an advanced text scanner. Recognizing text from a photo or converting a PDF image to Word is a piece of cake for it.

3. PDF-XChange Viewer

PDF-XChange Viewer is an equally popular free PDF reader as the first two applications in the list. It is a fast and functional document viewer that allows you to open, modify and add comments to PDF documents.

Its free tools also include an OCR system and the ability to save any sheet as an image in BMP, PNG, JPEG, TGA, GIF and TIFF formats. There are also options for filling out forms, searching for words and phrases and using security features. The PDF-XChange Viewer product has been updated and replaced by PDF-XChange Editor, which can also be downloaded for free in its basic version.

4. Tesseract

Tesseract is one of the most well-known OCR tools. The project provides both a CLI tool and the OCR engine itself. The project supports over 100 languages and has support for UTF-8, so it can easily handle the Polish language.

The tool cannot be used directly on PDF files. It accepts photos as input, so first we need to convert the PDF file into a series of photos.

5. OCRmyPDF

OCRmyPDF is a full-fledged PDF conversion tool. The OCR engine is the previously mentioned Tesseract. OCRmyPDF adds an overlay that allows you to process PDFs before performing OCR - you can use it to, for example, remove noise, improve page rotation, remove the appearance of scanned text. In addition, the tool can be run directly on PDF files.

We can definitely use this tool if we don't care about structured text. The program is great for extracting plain text, as well as for overlaying scanned text on a file.

Why is it worth implementing a PDF OCR program?

Using the OCR function, thanks to its functionalities, we are able to automate the process of entering documents from created PDF files, or word programs or others. OCR recognizes, sends OCR documents to the OCR-supported PDF programs and tools and processes them in it in such a way as to match the data to the corresponding columns.

The OCR function is extremely effective, so the main work on the document is its verification. Use the OCR function - streamline the document accounting process in your company.