Monday, December 28, 2015

Quick and Dirty OCR on OS X for Free

Wait, Stop, Don't spend that $80+ on some fancy OCR software just yet.  There are some free open source tools out there and with a bit of work you can have very functional workflow using them and OS X. This guide will help you set up an applet you can drop images onto to OCR them to plain text.  This will not create PDF's, formatted, or indent documents, but rather just one large text block that is structured the same as the source text with line breaks.  The following tools are used, but instructions are provided below so you don't need to download anything from the sites.
  • Homebrew The missing package manager for OS X
  • Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine
  • Automator

Friday, December 4, 2015