Smart OCR

Smart OCR is a Windows application specialized in turning scanned paper documents and PDF files into editable text by employing the optical character recognition technique.

The tool wins some extra points for its clean feature lineup which makes it easier even for less experienced users to handle the OCR mode. You are offered a preview of all pages included in the target document with the aid of thumbnails.

The main window is divided into two areas which are responsible for previewing the scanned data and analyzing the extracted text. This way, you can quickly compare both documents and see what’s missing.

A wizard-like assistant allows you to scan documents to Word or PDF files, create Word or PDF files out of scanned images, open a custom photo from your computer, or scan a file. When it comes to importing files, the tool works with BMP, JPG, PNG, TIF, and PDF file format.

Smart OCR offers you the possibility to extract text from the selected pages or all pages. Plus, you may rotate pages to different angles, zoom in or out of the document, as well as draw text, image, or table regions on the current page to make it easier for the program to extract data accurately.

Tests have shown that the tool carries out a task pretty quickly. It eats up CPU and memory resources so the overall performance of the computer may be affected. The utility offers very good output results when it comes to processing text but not the same thing can be said about tables where the information is messed up.

You are allowed to save the extracted text from scanned or PDF files to DOC, RTF, HTML, TXT, XLS, or PDF file format. You can carry out editing tasks before saving the information, such as change the size, font, and color of the text, alter the alignment, and activate the bold, strikethrough, or underline mode.

Smart OCR proves to be an efficient and useful-to-have application for manipulating scanned documents. If you are on the hunt for advanced features, such as batch manager, watched folder, custom dictionaries, MS Office integration, and Windows shell integration, you can check out the professional edition of the application, Smart OCR Pro.