OCR makes short work of digitizing your docs

The file cabinet looms large in the office, yet it guards its secrets jealously...even from you. It's time to convert those papers to space-saving, easy-to-find digital documents. For that, you need a scanner to turn them into digital images and an Optical Character Recognition program to convert those images into editable and searchable documents. I took four of the latest OCR programs and a free online OCR service for a test spin. All of them work to varying degrees.

To test the programs, I ran 22 varied and not particularly clean scans of documents—including one hand-written note—through four OCR programs and one free service. I looked for accuracy in text recognition, image extraction, and the ability to recreate them in a Word document. In addition, I processed 264 separate scans from a yearbook for output as a searchable PDF.

You don't actually need to install OCR software if you need to convert only a couple of small documents. You can use a free service such as Free-OCR (also known as Free-OCR.com) and upload a scan of your document. File size is limited to 2MB and 5000 pixels in any direction, which is about 150 dpi for a standard page. The OCR engine handles 29 languages, including English.

Free-OCR makes you jump through a CAPTCHA hoop, but does it apologetically.

  Although you don't have to register or even fork over your email address, the Free-OCR site does make you fill in one of those annoying CAPTCHAs. (Thanks, Web bad guys, for making everyone's life more difficult.) However, those CAPTCHAs serve to remind one just how difficult OCR can be. If humans, with our incredible heuristic abilities, occasionally have problems with these, just think how poor straight-line software perusing a stream of bits must feel.

Free-OCR did a decent job of extracting the text from the test documents. With standard typed pages, you should have no problems as long as you don't have fancy plans for the scanned text: The site does not output files or recreate documents. It simply places the extracted text in a box for cutting and pasting. As a matter of fact, embedded graphics tend to confuse the output.

Free-OCR s text capture works well, but even simple graphics confuse the website. Free-OCR is not suitable for large jobs or overly complex documents, but when all you need is to quickly get the text out of a basic document scan, it will do nicely in most cases.

Tip: Use Microsoft Paint to reduce the size of any image you wish to use to 150 dpi.
FreeOCR is a nice, simple front-end for HP's public-domain Tesseract OCR engine (now used by Google) and is roughly the installable equivalent of the unrelated Free-OCR website. It interfaces directly with scanners in addition to importing image files, and it extracts text into a box from which you can cut and paste. The program is extremely easy to use and works well if all you want is text. It even extracts text from PDFs, though it exports only to text.

FreeOCR, though unrelated to Free-OCR, is just as easy to use. FreeOCR processes only one image at a time, but will OCR multi-page PDFs. And, unlike the Free-OCR website, there's no limit on file size. Also, FreeOCR can create Word and RTF documents from the text it extracts, but it's just pasted text: There's no attempt to reconstruct the document or place images.

Read this dialog box and select your options carefully when clicking through FreeOCR's installation. As far as it goes, FreeOCR is a neat little program, though it tries to install toolbars and reset your browser home page. You can install the program while cancelling and declining all offers (though it's unintuitive and the negative response buttons are grayed out). If you couldn't do that, you wouldn't be reading about FreeOCR 4.2 in this roundup.

X is a busy character these days. Not only is it still used traditionally in words, it's featured in the end of movie credits as the Roman "10," and has achieved rock star status as shorthand for eXtreme. It's even used in the name of Acrobat XI. Best of all, it can be used to illustrate one the major tools available to OCR technologists for recognizing symbols: context, i.e., looking at what surrounds a character to help identify it.
Acrobat XI Standard is very good at leveraging context and does a bang-up job of recreating entire documents, including text, images, and layout, then outputting them as the increasingly popular editable PDFs, .RTF, and Word docs. If outputting documents that look like the original is your focus, it's great. It is, however, a little less aggressive and slightly less successful at extracting text from some images than Nuance OmniPage and Abbyy FineReader, which are reviewed below.

The Readiris OCR engine gives Adobe Acrobat XI an edge in accuracy. Acrobat XI lacks the side-by-side comparison of original documents with their recreated doppelgangers that most programs offer: Word, RTF, and the like are simply saved. However, the output files are very accurate (thanks to the Readiris OCR engine), and you can fine-tune the results of PDFs in-line with the "Find OCR suspects" function.

Although Acrobat XI is primarily for PDFs, its OCR is so good that you can easily forego an auxiliary OCR program if you buy it. But at $499 for the Pro version and $299 for Standard, it is expensive. OmniPage and FineReader perform OCR and handle the PDF basics for considerably less cash.

OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) is Acrobat XI's equal at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.

At defaults, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a great job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.

  OmniPage features the side-by-side comparison editing of all types of files that Acrobat's lacks, and its interface is bit more flexible than Abbyy FineReader's, allowing you to arrange the various panes in more ways. Like Acrobat, OmniPage also provides a batch manager for automating multiple jobs.

OmniPage Ultimate 19 is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool. Maybe Nuance will even consider handwriting OCR in the future.

Anyone who's purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there's no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it's not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.

Abbyy's dual-paned interface makes it easy to compare originals to OCR. FineReader is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next to it, and the OCR'd text and elements in a pane on the right side. This side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage, makes it super-easy to spot mistakes and compare page elements.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including ePub, editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.

FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you're better off using Windows' own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR'ing.
While the $170 Professional Edition that I tested slightly more expensive than OmniPage Standard, it is also available in a capable $50 Express 9 version.

OCR programs are as useless unless they have digitized images to work with. For that, you need a scanner.
A fast sheet-fed scanner that scans both sides of the page simultaneously is worth its weight in gold for anyone with lots of two-sided business documents to transfer into the digital domain. HP's Scanjet Professionals or Fujitsu's ScanSnaps are available for under $500.

A garden-variety A4/letter-sized flatbed scanner such as Canon's $200 CanoScan 9000F or similar is great for small to standard-sized photos, magazine articles, etc.

For oversized books, such as atlases or the high-school yearbook used in my testing, you'll need something that handles larger documents. I used Plustek's pricey but fast $600 Optic Pro A320. Mustek makes a variety of cheaper, albeit slower large-format scanners.

TIp: Most scanners bundle competent, albeit less comprehensive, versions of the software we've covered. Grab your scanner first, then see if you need to upgrade the software.

If PDFs are your focus, then Acrobat XI is a very good choice, though you'll pay a lot for either Standard or Pro. Most users will be just fine with the less expensive OmniPage Standard 18 or Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional version. OmniPage gets a slight nod if you're outputting RTF or Word documents, but it's otherwise a tie. 

The future is 'ultramobile:' Intel makes the PC persona non grata

While the PC isn't disappearing anytime soon, it may as well be the deranged grandmother locked away within Intel's attic, whose faint screams are ignored in the rooms below.

Indeed, Intel's newly-minted chief executive, Brian Krzanich, didn't even mention notebooks, let alone the desktop, in his prepared remarks. And the only mention he made of the personal computer was a mea culpa: "We were slow to respond to the ultramobile PC trend," he said, admitting that part of Intel's job was to scan for trends and react to them.

IntelIntel chief executive Brian Krzanich.

  Krzanich has an excuse: he's been on the job for just two months, taking over for Intel's prior chief executive, Paul Otellini. As analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights noted, Intel was bailed out once again by its success in the data center market, where revenue was up 6.1 percent sequentially and flat year-over-year in Intel's second-quarter earnings, that it reported on Wednesday. But sales within the PC Client group plunged 7.5 percent compared to the same period a year ago, representative of the continuing slide in the PC market.
But Krzanich made clear several things:

Minimizing power, not maximizing performance, is now the point of almost everything Intel does."Ultramobile" is now synonymous with PC. Desktops and notebooks exist, but they won't be the priority. And tablets will make up a small, but increasing portion of Intel's business, using its Atom processor.Those with the best fabs, win. Intel will ramp its next-generation 14-nm manufacturing technology this fall, a fundamental approach to increasing performance, lowering power consumption, and extending battery life. Defect densities with Intel's current 22-nm process are at record lows.Intel's Atom processor is now on an equal footing with Intel's Core chips with the PC. "Atom will be an equal player in technological leadership within the product space," Krzanich said. 

IntelManufacturing will continue to be a key to Intel's success.

Intel's call with analysts was also notable for what it downplayed: performance. Over the years I've covered chipmakers in Silicon Valley, every conversation at least touched upon performance: the frame rates GPUs achieved in leading-edge games, how well a particular DSP performed a particular operation, or the number of MIPS generated by an embedded CPU. Instead, Krzanich applied the performance argument really only where Intel faces a disadvantage: in the tablet market, competing with the lower-cost ARM processors. (Intel executives have said previously that the upcoming Silvermont or Bay Trail Atom chips outperform ARM's Cortex-A15 in both performance and battery life. A recent dispute appears to give ARM an edge over Intel's current Clover Trail+ chip, however.)

"So Bay Trail really first and foremost we believe gives solid performance, solid battery life relative to the competition in price points and markets that we're simply not in, in a big way today," Krzanich said.
Intel executives reiterated two key points, over and over: cost, and power. Krzanich didn't paint Intel's next-generation Core chip, Haswell, as a tool for healthcare or engineering. Instead, it will help power what Krzanich said were 50 next-generation "two-in-one" convertible tablet designs. And Samsung will include Intel's next-generation "Bay Trail" chip and LTE baseband solution inside Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Tab 3 tablet.

IntelIntel's Atom processor. Intel chief financial officer Stacy Smith staked out some pretty aggressive price points during Intel's first-quarter call in April: touch-enabled ultrabooks will sell for $499 and $599 during the holidays, he said, with $300 "Bay Trail" Windows and ARM tablets making up the low end. On Wednesday, Krzanich went even further, stating that clamshells and touch-enabled convertibles could be priced under $400, and even under $300 in some cases. Intel-based tablets should cost about $199, and as low as $150. (Whether those ultra-cheap tablets will be powered by the older Clover Trail tablets or the newer Bay Trail tablets wasn't clear.) The fact that Intel's Atom processors can be used both with Windows and Android makes them even more attractive to customers, Krzanich claimed.

I've wondered before whether Intel's Atom and Core processors would collide at the low end, and whether or not the company would be able to set up a clear delineation between the two. If Intel can really hit both price points with its two chip families, it appears that won't be a problem.

And Krzanich said as much during Thursday's call. "Let me say our view right now on Bay Trail is that we don’t believe it will be cannibalistic in nature," Krzanich said. "We believe what it really does it allows us to get into these markets that we’re not in, in a big way today."

The underlying message is that Intel believes that is has essentially won the PC market, relegating rival AMD to the values segment within desktops and notebooks. To its credit, however, AMD has captured all of the major consoles, and has shown a willingness to design semicustom chips for key partners. Nevertheless, Intel is far more worried about the threat ARM poses in the tablet and ultraportable market, where cost and power are the key metrics.

To date, buyers have been suspicious of heavily discounted tablets and notebooks, precisely because the performance has ranged from disappointing to awful. Intel clearly believes the Atom can change that perception; if it can, Intel will also change the game. 

OneNote MX update makes app more business friendly

Microsoft pushed out an update for OneNote MX—the OneNote app for Windows 8—which makes the app more useful for business users. The new OneNote MX can connect to OneNote notebooks on Office 365.
OneNote MX is a great tool, but it has had limited functionality for business users. The issue is that OneNote MX connects by default to the SkyDrive associated with the Microsoft account used to log in to Windows 8. That’s fine for personal use, but businesses prefer that data be created and stored where it can be centrally managed and shared, rather than being spread across multiple personal SkyDrive accounts.
The update for OneNote MX enables users to connect to OneNote notebooks stored in an Office 365 SkyDrive account.
OneNote has become a crown jewel of the Microsoft Office suite, and it has led the way in blazing cross-platform trails for Office. Long before Microsoft finally made Office Mobile for iPhone, OneNote was available as a standalone app for both iOS and Android.

The radial menu is an innovative tool that makes OneNote uniquely suited for a touchscreen.
When Microsoft launched Windows 8, with its split-personality interface, OneNote was the first of the Microsoft Office tools developed by Microsoft as a Windows 8 app. Microsoft Office, and the traditional OneNote application run in the desktop mode in Windows 8 Pro, and Microsoft created Office RT apps that run in desktop mode on Windows RT devices. OneNote MX, however, runs natively in the Windows 8 Metro interface.
OneNote MX is uniquely suited for touchscreen interaction. The radial menu developed by Microsoft makes it simple to navigate options, work with information, and change formatting for OneNote notebook entries. Microsoft has made all of the Microsoft Office tools more “touch-friendly” than previous versions, but they pale in comparison to OneNote MX.
Aside from enabling OneNote MX to connect with Office 365 accounts, the update also makes it easier to get the virtual keyboard out of the way. When you’re not actually using the virtual keyboard, you don’t want it taking up half of the display. You can simply tap any empty space to make the virtual keyboard disappear, and tap again to bring it back.

The radial menu still works just as smoothly with a mouse or touchpad, but the traditional OneNote is not as simple to navigate or use with a touchscreen display. As Microsoft continues down the Windows 8 path, I expect we’ll see the rest of the Microsoft Office applications converted to Windows 8 Metro-esque versions like OneNote MX. It just makes sense. 

Mac Gems: Instacast for Mac makes listening to podcasts a pleasure

Instacast 1.0.1 for Mac $20.00 If you listen to podcasts, Instacast belongs on your Mac, particularly if you find yourself switching between devices when you're on the go.


I never though I’d say this when I first listened to a podcast, many years ago, but I love podcasts. Each week I listen to a dozen or so different shows, some produced by friends, and others by celebrities of various caliber.

Apple offers a couple apps that are supposed to make it easy to listen to podcasts: iTunes on the desktop, and the appropriately-named Podcasts on iOS. Alas, these two apps might as well have been developed by two different companies, because making them work in tandem—particularly when it comes to syncing episodes between them—is, well, complicated.

Since I could never make Apple’s own software work well, a while back I switched to Vemedio’s Instacast for iOS for listening on my iOS devices. I’ve been very happy with it, so I was pleased when the software finally made its way to OS X in the form of Instacast for Mac.

Instacast looks exactly like I think a podcast app should. Its main interface takes a cue from recent versions of Apple’s Mail, dividing the screen in three vertical panes: On the left is a list of the podcasts you subscribe to; in the middle is a list of available episodes for the selected show; and on the right is information about the selected episode.

That’s pretty much the entire interface. Unlike iTunes, which has grown over the years into an agglomerate of half a dozen different apps worth of features, Instacast does one thing and does it exceptionally well. Even better, when you want it out of the way, the window minimizes in a convenient mini player that, much like iTunes’s, can be safely stashed away in a corner without closing the app. (Alas, there’s no way to remove Instacast’s icon from the Dock, which would make it even more discrete.)

Instacast's user interface is simple, accessible, and uncluttered.
In addition to playing back individual episodes of a podcast, Instacast allows you to organize episodes in a couple interesting ways. The first is to create playlists of episodes from your subscriptions. This feature essentially lets you create your own talk-radio station filled with your favorite podcasts.

The second is to create smart lists that automatically aggregate episodes based on criteria you define. For example, you can pull together all the episodes you haven’t finished listening to, or just those that have been added recently.

By default, only the most-recent episode of each subscribed podcast is downloaded to your computer—if you play an older episode from your subscription list, that episode is streamed from the Internet. However, you can choose to have Instacast automatically download older episodes for offline access; the app lets you limit the total amount of drive space it uses, deleting older episodes to make room for new ones.

Instacast’s sharing features include support for Twitter, App.net, email, iMessage, and a few additional Web services. You can also connect to your account on the micropayment site Flattr to provide small donations to each podcast’s producers when you listen to their work.

Unfortunately, Instacast doesn’t include any kind of social-oriented discovery features, which is a shame. When adding a new podcast, you can choose from a number of different groups, or search for a specific show, but there’s no way to find podcasts that your friends are listening to (or watching). That would be a convenient way to discover new shows, particularly considering how tightly Apple has been integrating various social-media networks into OS X and iOS.

Instacast makes it easy to discover and subscribe to new podcasts, though it can’t tell you what your friends listen to.
One area where Instacast especially shines is syncing across devices. Through a feature aptly named Instacast Cloud, which is free to to all registered users, you can sync subscriptions, episodes, and playback status across multiple copies of the app on any supported platform. Once you've provided your Instacast Cloud username and password, everything is handled automagically.

I’ve used this feature ever since the initial public beta of Instacast for Mac, and it has worked flawlessly. I can, for example, stop playback of the latest episode of the Macworld Podcast on my laptop, step outside for a walk, and launch Instacast for iOS to pick up immediately where I left off. The feature works without a hitch, and it’s free—what more could you ask for?

On its own, Instacast is a great app that deserves a spot on your Mac if you listen to podcasts. It’s been deliberately designed to provide all the important features you need without overloading you with needless extras. Coupled with its iOS counterparts, however, Instacast is an absolute pleasure to use. The sync feature is powerful and automatic, letting you jump seamlessly between devices, perfectly matching today’s mobile lifestyles.

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Halle Berry's 'The Call' Makes Strong Debut on Home Entertainment Charts

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment nabbed two of the three No. 1 home video chart positions the week ending June 30 with The Call, a crime thriller starring Halle Berry as a 911 dispatcher rattled by a bad call who seeks redemption in trying to save the life of a kidnapped teenage girl.

The film earned $51.9 million in U.S. theaters and debuted at No. 1 on both the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales chart, which tracks overall discs sales, DVD and Blu-ray Disc combined, and Home Media Magazine’s rental chart.

But with DVD accounting for 74 percent of unit sales, it’s no surprise that The Call could only muster a No. 3 debut on Nielsen’s dedicated Blu-ray Disc sales chart, behind top-ranked Jack the Giant Slayer, from Warner Bros., and Oz the Great and Powerful, from Walt Disney. Both films occupied the same position on the Blu-ray Disc chart the previous week, when Jack debuted at No. 1 on both sales charts.

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On the latest First Alert chart, Jack slipped a notch to No. 2, bumping Oz the Great and Powerful to No. 3.

The No. 4 spot on First Alert (and the No. 5 spot on the Blu-ray Disc chart) went to Despicable Me, from Universal Studios, which rose from No. 12 the previous week based on soaring consumer interest in the Fourth of July weekend theatrical opening of Despicable Me 2.

Warner’s The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, about a comedy rivalry between old- and new-school Las Vegas magicians, debuted at No. 6 on First Alert and No. 4 on the Blu-ray Disc sales chart. The film was panned by critics and earned a meager $22.5 million in theaters despite starring roles by comic heavyweights Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi and Jim Carrey. The film’s video performance was undoubtedly helped by media coverage of the death of actor James Gandolfini, best known as television’s Tony Soprano, who plays a supporting role in the film.

The only other new release to make it into the top 10 on the overall disc sales chart was a Walmart exclusive called Illumination 7 Mini Movie Collection, a DVD-only collection of animated shorts based on three Universal Studios animated movies (Despicable Me, The Lorax and Hop) released to promote the theatrical release of Despicable Me 2.

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On Home Media Magazine’s video rental chart for the week, The Call was followed by a trio of third-weekers: Oz the Great and Powerful at No. 2, Lionsgate’s Snitch at No. 3, and Paramount’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters at No. 4.

The No. 5 spot went to the Universal Studios thriller Side Effects, which was No. 1 last week, when it came off its 28-day holdback from select rental outlets.

The Baby Bachelor Us Weekly Cover: Wesley Makes Decision in "Emotional" Finale

Baby Bachelor Wesley will have to make a tough decision on the upcoming season finale of The Baby Bachelor.

Who will little Wesley choose? Jimmy Kimmel's adorable nephew, who stars in the late night talk show's spoof series The Baby Bachelor, will face a difficult decision in the upcoming season finale on Thursday, June 20.

After four weeks of one-on-one dates, hometown visits, and drama (finalist Jesse is "wrong for Wesley," one simpering, rejected contestant said during a confessional), the very eligible young bachelor will have to decide which tiny tot he'll extend his ring pop to at the end of his "journey."

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Will it be mild-mannered Gabrielle, who revealed to Wesley that she has a baby (doll) during a particularly awkward one-on-one milk-fueled dinner date?

Or will it be "stay-at-home daughter" Jesse, whose evil cackling and schemes to win over Wesley have rubbed the other contestants the wrong way?

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Watch the season finale of The Baby Bachelor on Thursday, June 20 at 11:35 p.m. EST on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live to find out!

 

Suffer from hyperhidrosis? New procedure makes it no sweat

OGDEN — More than 211 million people around the world suffer from profuse sweating.

According to the International Hyperhidrosis Society, more than 8 million of those folks live in America. And whether it’s caused by stress, anxiety, hormonal changes, medical conditions or genetics, it can be an embarrassing problem for many.

“No one really knows why some people sweat more than others,” said Dr. Chad Tingey, a dermatologist at Ogden Clinic. “It’s likely linked to genetics. Some people’s armpits sweat 1,000 times worse than others, and it can be very stressful or traumatizing for some.”

Each of us has millions of sweat glands all over our bodies, said Tingey. In our armpits alone, we have more than 1 million sweat glands.