Editor's review
This software tool is able to turn scanned text pages in PDF format into editable text characters in ASCII format.
A-PDF OCR is a fast desktop utility program for optical character recognition of text characters. When a page is scanned electronically it is turned into an image and thus you need a program that can optically recognize these characters and turn them into ASCII codes so that computers can understand them. When that happens, word editing programs will work on these files directly. This tool has a built in rich text editor which allows you to edit OCR result text, and you would not need the MS Office tools either. The conversion is done in a single click operation. You are able to select a single page or a range of pages or all the pages of the source PDF document. A-PDF supports multiple languages and they include English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.
The first step in the conversion process is to de-skew the pages that you want to OCR and only then start the OCR process. This should increase the correct conversion rate significantly. The quality of OCR output is affected by things like poor image quality of the scanned document, mixture of fonts used in the scanned documents, and italicized and underlined fonts, etc. The fonts with these characteristics in the document tend to blur the images, when it becomes difficult for recognition. That brings us to the issue that despite best efforts the success rate is never 100%, which means some amount of edit will always be required. Even at a low failure rate, the amount of edit can become substantial on a large document. Otherwise, this is a very convenient tool and one that you should keep handy if your workload includes such conversions.
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