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General discussion

Best Text Recognition Program?

Feb 21, 2009 4:56AM PST

I am interested in archiving my files by scanning all documents into a PDF format and would like to know which is the best program that is capable of text recognition in a PDF format. All I want it to do is type in the word (for example, settlement) and the documents with this word are shown with a preview of where in the document the word is.

Can anyone suggest a couple of programs that may help with this issue? Thanks!

Discussion is locked

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Re: scanning
Feb 21, 2009 5:30AM PST

I would start trying if a scanned pdf file gives searchable text. It might well be more like a bitmap (a picture). That's easy to try. Scan one of your documents to pdf and use Adobe reader to search for a word.

If that works, Google desktop search (see http://desktop.google.com/features.html) will do the trick: it indexes pdf-files also.

If it doesn't work, you'll need to use an OCR-program to convert the scan to a machine-readable document first. Google desktop search will surely be usable then.

Kees

Kees

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Thanks, however...
Feb 22, 2009 1:11AM PST

Thank you very much for your suggestion. I have installed google desktop and it is very close to what I would love to use. A search engine that would index my documents.

However, despite google indexing my harddrive, it has yet to be able to recognize a single test word I have put in. I have stated the word, 'plaintiff' and despite knowing there is one document that was scanned into a pdf with OCR that a couple of the programs I have tried, but were not impressed with, were able to find the keyword, google has failed to find it.

Do you know of any other programs similar to google desktop that would work?

Thank you very much for your suggestions.

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It might take some time to index all your documents.
Feb 22, 2009 3:03AM PST

Let it run for a night.

Kees