You have a few options you can try. You can then search through this document and any others you convert via Drive itself. The more I think about it, though, that solution seems a little inelegant given how many files you have to work with. Instead, I might try a piece of software like TesseractStudio. You should be able to use this to create OCR data from your files, and you can then search for them directly via Windows or macOS. Hopefully, one of those solutions works out for you—without costing you a small fortune.
Write back and let me know which app worked best for you! Do you have a tech question keeping you up at night? Working with text on your computer offers a range of possibilities in searching and editing that simply aren't available with hard copy text. Check out these five text recognition tools to get your printed text into your computer. Photo by mmechinita. Optical Character Recognition OCR has been around for decades but only recently has become both economical and easy enough to use that it is within the reach of the average consumer.
Today we're looking at Lifehacker readers' five favorite applications for turning physical text into machine-readable virtual text. Included in all versions from Adobe Acrobat Standard to Pro Extended and tucked in a sub-menu, the OCR functionality in Adobe is robust and works with both scanned and already saved documents.
Many people already have a copy of Acrobat at home or at work and find that the OCR quality is high enough that they have little reason to invest the money in a dedicated OCR tool.
We grouped Evernote and OneNote together because they share a common limitation. Genius Scan from Grizzly Labs is a simple, cross-platform document scanner that makes snapping quick images or generating PDFs of receipts, notes, sketches, or anything else as simple as a single tap.
The app automatically lines up, isolates, and enhances the final scan, bringing out text and making it more prominent in the final image, and then converting the whole thing to PDF and keeping it in your library so you can email or share it later. The app also gives you some basic editing tools, like auto cropping and archiving.
It also fixes image perspective, so even that shot you took of a receipt on the restaurant table at an angle will wind up looking flat when the PDF is generated. Those of you who nominated Genius Scan noted that it's super simple to use and intuitive, so you don't have to fiddle with menus or drop-down boxes when all you want to do is scan a receipt at a restaurant or notes in a meeting while everyone else is packing up to leave.
You also praised Genius Scan for its customer support and regular updates to the app. You can read more in its nomination thread here. If you're a die-hard Evernote user, Scannable may be the best option for you Scannable on the iPhone and iPad allows you to instantly scan business cards, sketches, receipts, paper documents, and even multi-page documents with ease, and automatically file and organize the resulting images and files in your Evernote account. Your scans are automatically cropped to remove backgrounds like the table behind the reciept, for example and enhanced so the text is readable.
If you scan a business card, the contact information from the card is automatically lifted and added to a contact card, so you can call the person, email them, or visit their website or social presence with a single tap. It's relatively new , and while it works best with Evernote, it also allows you to share your resulting scan with other apps on your iOS device, so you can upload it to Dropbox, email it, or save it to your camera roll.
Best of all, it's completely and totally free—no unlocks, no premium version, although it definitely works best if you also use Evernote. Those of you who nominated Scannable praised it for being smart about when and how it scans your documents, and for being reliably accurate with its results. The best thing about Scannable is that you don't have to line up and take a shot—the app handles that for you.
Just bring the open camera into view of your document, and it'll pick the right time to snap, scan, and process the image. Many of you also shared your stories using the app, highlighted how well it worked especially for business cards and contact information , and of course, noted that it makes sense to use if you're already an Evernote enthusiast. Read more in its nomination thread here. The app can handle receipts at the bar or multi-page documents from class just as easily, and the app's OCR premium users only supports 44 different languages although it doesn't translate between them.
You can export your resulting file as an image, or as any of 12 different document types, including Office documents, PDFs, text files, and more. FineScanner can remove backgrounds from your scans, automatically enhance the final image to bring out text or highlight graphics. Plus, everything you save is archived in the app for future use, or you can tell FineScanner to save your files to cloud storage services like Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Evernote, and others.
The app is free, but it has some fairly cagey in-app purchases—and you'll probably want them in order to make use of its best features.
Either way, we'd suggest trying the free version and see if a feature you want is hidden behind an IAP.
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