This is one of those TLAs (three-letter-acronyms) that technologists throw around seemingly just to confuse the rest of society, but this can be a particularly useful tool for you!
OCR stands for Opticåal Character Recognition. Basically it is software that can make characters (letters & numbers) out of an image or scanned document. If you are a business that does or will be doing a lot of this transfer/conversion work you may do well to examine the options for professional software that provides this service with many valuable options... but for those of us who may need this only occasionally this browser based service is ideal!
Here is where this comes in handy... let's say you have a printed page and you want to get it into your computer, you may want to include the information as part of a new document, presentation or even titles in a video you are producing.
You can scan that document as a black & white image (JPEG) and then the OCR software can read it and make it into a text document for you!
I have used several different versions of OCR software over the years but just today found a really cool browser based OCR service, and I want to share it with my friends!
The service is called OCR Terminal. You sign-up (quickly
done with no obligation) and after you enter the confirmation code sent
to your email, you are looking at the OCR Terminal in your web
browser. You select the image (or scanned document) and ask it to
process. You can save the 'scan job' as one of several document types
and voila, you are done! Now with OCR Terminal, and pretty much any other OCR software, you
need to (and should) review the document for accuracy. There are some
characters that may be transposed or mixed-up. You could use a spell
checker as well , but I prefer to review the original image/document
against the new file. All OCR Terminal users (account holders) get 50 free pages each month! And if you want/need additional pages processed after that you can choose between either a pay per page or monthly account (subscription) plan. I am really pleased with this new find and will be taking advantage of this for quite some time. You can find out more about OCR Terminal at their website here www.ocrterminal.com
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