Saturday, September 16, 2017

OCR App

OCR App (LEAD Technologies) is a Mac app for optical character recognition. The results are not perfect, but the app is free. The app icon: T as in text.

I tried OCR App with a recent piece of writing. A scan of an image file of the first page began:

It was a beautiful morning on the Martin farm. Sun streamed into the kitchen, where Paul and Ruth Martin and Uncle Petrie were enjoying a second cup of couee. Lassie was drinking from her water dish. The sunlight made her coat glisten. Timmy Martin was just finishing his milk when his mother noticed a small story in the Calverton Herald.
Almost perfect. Small glitches with apostrophes and quotation marks were the only other problems. A scan of a PDF of the whole story was better: OCR App missed a couple of dashes, misread goin’ as gain’, and turned a quotation mark into the numeral 11. Be prepared to proofread carfully.

Anyone who makes significant use of optical character recognition will probably require an app with greater accuracy. But for occasional use, this free app is perfect.

[If there’s any doubt: carfully is a joke.]

comments: 2

Slywy said...

I wanted to know if couee was a variation of covfefe, maybe with chicory?

Michael Leddy said...

It made me think of covfefe, which is sometimes now my word for coffee. I think that couee is available only in Calverton and environs.