Victory: Irfanview for OCR

[webmanoffesto]

I had a nice victory this week with Irfanview and OCR (optical character recognition).

I had a good quality scan of a page I didn't want to retype.

I opened up Irfanview IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide and installed the plugin package IrfanView PlugIns
I installed the whole package of plugins but the OCR part is called Kadmos OCR KADMOS / IrfanView.

Then I opened the scanned page in Irfanview

clicked Options / Start OCR

then I was shown a page with the text parts highlighted in yellow

in fact this was the hardest part of the job, because I kept looking for an "export text" button.

But, all I needed to do was click (or click drag to select) on the area of the text I wanted and it automatically opens a text editor page with that text in it. That was so simple I almost missed it.

Awesome app, and free.

I couldn't find any clips on Youtube showing this ability.

 

[mjf]

Good to know

 

[gini]

Great tip; thanks!

 

[SIW2]

Irfanview is a great app.

 

[A Guy]

Irfanview is my default image viewer/editor. A Guy

 

[mjf]

I used to use Irfanview but ended up using Faststone for my photo hobby work.
But as the OP mentioned Irfanview has good plugins (didn't realise the OCR one). Both are lightweight and portable so I have the 2 sitting there.