There are many specialized tools for digitizing books or translating text from a graphic image into an editable format. The best of them are described in this article.
ABBYY FineReader
FineReader is a professional program for scanning and recognizing text. It is used by both ordinary users and specialists of large companies. This utility is rightfully considered the most popular in its segment. Its only drawback is the need to purchase a license. However, from the official site you can download a trial version. The period of its use is limited to fifteen days, but no more than 50 pages can be recognized during this time.
Using FineReader, you can create editable text from paper books (this requires a scanner), PDF documents or images. The scanning program can work with 179 languages. Results can be exported to popular electronic document formats or to Outlook mail manager. The scanning program fully preserves the structure of recognized documents. All subheadings, tables, illustrations, paragraphs will remain in the same place as in the original.
The interface is simple and straightforward. Even an inexperienced user can understand the controls. The inscriptions on all elements are translated into several languages. To select Russian, you need to switch the selector during installation.
Cuneiform
CuneiForm is a completely free program for scanning text and its subsequent recognition. It was developed by the Russian company Cognitive OpenOCR. The creators themselves call their brainchild an intellectual system that is designed to simplify the transformation of images or paper documents into an editable format. Like FineReader, the program retains the structure of documents.
But unlike it, built-in algorithms also determine the fonts used in the text. As a result, digitizing documents takes less time. The user can process files in turn for complete control of the processes or in batch mode.
Key Features
The main features of the program:
- use of a scanner;
- work with twenty languages;
- support for electronic, newspaper, book fonts;
- definition of tables, both with and without a grid;
- work with both color and black and white sources.
The utility recognizes text even from low-quality scans. The program algorithms do an excellent job with faxes, photocopies, printouts from dot matrix printers. If individual letters of words were not recognized correctly, the application will mark them. Subsequently, the text can be processed by the built-in dictionary. You can add words to it. After recognition, the text can be changed in the utility itself, since an editor is built into it.
The scanning program has a simple interface, so even inexperienced users can work in it. In the main window there are large buttons that launch basic operations. By clicking on the icon with the picture of a magic wand, a step-by-step assistant will turn on. He will guide the user through all stages: scanning, recognition, editing, saving. You will only need to follow the instructions.
The only minus of the utility is the lack of support for PDF documents, and such files are often found.
Vuescan
VueScan is a scanning program with built-in support for more than 3,000 scanner models. It is compatible with all popular operating systems of the Windows family. One of its main advantages is the creation of high quality scans.
The application literally activates the scanner in a couple of clicks. Built-in tools not only allow you to transfer materials from paper to digital formats, but also adjust brightness, contrast, resolution, compression ratio. Such functionality will appeal to users working with graphic images.
Scanned documents can be saved in three formats: PDF, TIFF, JPG. The scanning program requires a license, but you can try it for free. The interface is not translated into Russian.
Of course, VueScan is not a rival to the above two programs. First of all, it can be recommended to those users whose equipment does not work in conjunction with modern software.