

For example, the Google Drive app lets you make some pretty good scans using nothing but your phone camera. Today, the sophisticated cameras found on even budget models offer high-resolution images that are good enough to use as a replacement for a document scanner. The resulting images weren’t really useful for anything and you certainly couldn’t make out fine detail such as text. When the first phones with built-in digital cameras came to market the quality on offer was truly awful. So you can clean up the images before trying to extract text from them. The app also has, as you’d expect from the creators of PhotoShop, a small set of touch-up tools. In fact, if you spend a lot of time meeting people, it could save you a heck of a lot of time. The ability to automatically scan, OCR and contacts from a business card is very cool. There are a few other reasons to try out Adobe Scan. Don’t expect it to decipher something you can’t read yourself. Of course, good quality handwriting will be better recognized. In my opinion, the conversion accuracy of the Microsoft tools was considerably better than SimpleOCR.One of the best features of the Adobe OCR software is its ability to recognize handwriting. SimpleOCR was fine with normal text, but its handling of multi-column layouts was a disappointment.

The converted file can be saved to a DOC or TXT format.Conversion to text takes the process into a validation stage a user can correct discrepancies in the converted text using an in-built spell-checker.SimpleOCR offers some control over the conversion through text selection, image selection and text ignore features.Set it up to read directly from a scanner or by adding a page (JPG, TIFF, BMP formats).The software is clunky and looks outdated as it hasn't been updated since version 3.1, but you can still try it out for its simplicity. Machine print recognition though does not have any restrictions. But the software offers handwriting recognition only as a 14-day free trial. Price: ABBYY FineReader Express Edition for Mac costs 99.99 Accuracy: It provides outstanding accuracy when converting a variety of document types into popular.

The problem I was having with handwriting recognition using Microsoft tools could have been solved by SimpleOCR. This is a screen capture of SimpleOCR's interface
