iPhone Scanning/OCR Apps
I recently discovered two iPhone apps that can “scan” documents using the camera, perform OCR, and then e-mail the text:
- PDFpen Scan+ is from Smile and uses the Tesseract OCR engine.
- TextGrabber is from ABBYY and uses their own OCR engine.
I find the Mac version of PDFpen to be much nicer than ABBYY FineReader, although the OCR is somewhat less accurate for documents from my ScanSnap. I often invoke PDFpen’s OCR via AppleScript.
On iOS, I found TextGrabber’s interface to be smoother and faster. The edge detection worked better, and the OCR was much more accurate.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
You're forgetting Prizmo.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prizmo-scanning-ocr-speech/id366791896?mt=8
There's also a Mac version.
@someone Thanks. It looks like Prizmo uses the ExperExchange engine, which from what I’ve heard is not as good as ABBYY’s. The apps look promising, though. The Mac version requires the “Pro Pack” to use AppleScript. The Web site says that there is a trial, but I was only able to try the regular version.
I use Prizmo on my iPhone and the OCR engine seems to be doing a great job… Pretty good at detecting pages and correcting geometry issues too.
I've never used TextGrabber though so I can't really compare.
