Optical Character Recognition Programs

     I have posted on this subject a long time ago, but the other day I had to reset my Firefox browser and in the process lost one of my most used apps, an optical character reader, and had to reinstall it. So, here is an update on a couple of must have free OCR programs. 

     Copyfish is an optical character recognition (OCR) extension for Firefox and Chrome web browsers. It extracts text from images, videos and PDF files. Copyfish is an add-on that lets you extract text from almost anything in a browser tab...extract text from videos, PDF files, and images including photos, screenshots, memes, error messages, etc. 

     It puts an icon in the address bar of your browser. All you have to do is click on the icon, select the area with the text you want extracted and Copyfish opens a separate window, extracts and displays the extracted text which you can copy to the clipboard, redo the OCR, recapture or translate. 

     The translate button opens a new window showing Google Translate with your text pre-pasted so all you have to do is choose languages. 

     Copyfish does a good job with basic tasks. By the way, in most of the applications you have to right click on the icon. If you're looking for more functions there are two paid plans with extra features. 

 

Chrome 

Firefox 

 

     FreeOCR is quite basic and very simple to use. It allows you to import directly from twain scanners, PDFs and popular image formats and the latest release has been tested with Windows 10. Available default languages are English, Danish, German, Finnish, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish and Swedish.

     The output is in plain text and can export to Microsoft Word format. Free OCR uses the latest Tesseract (v3.01) OCR engine. This is an older program that works with indows XP (Service pack 2), Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Desktop. I have not tried or with Windows 10 or 11.