Tag: OCR

Google Docs introduced its OCR feature last year, and its addition was a welcome one for anyone who uploads photgraphed or scanned documents like receipts, faxes, or other dead-tree materials. Now, Google has announced that OCR support is being expanded beyond the original five languages -- English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish -- to a whopping 34 in total. The official post also ...

Like spam filters, Captcha is one of the necessary evils of the Internet. Google's Captcha is consistently irritating for me. I routinely fail it at least once, sometimes twice in a row, and I'm not a robot (to the best of my knowledge). Google bought reCAPTCHA a while back, and it's nicer (and helps a good cause), but they still seem to be using their older, super-irritating Captcha in many ...

Google Docs continues to make the case for dumping your desktop work apps, this time with a useful new text recognition feature that converts PDFs or images into plain, editable text. This new OCR feature -- that's optical character recognition -- is quite accurate, and worked pretty well on some old college textbooks scans I had laying around on my hard drive. Things are a bit tricky when you've ...

WhatTheFont is pretty much the established player in the font identification market. The service's claim to fame is its ability to figure out what font is used in a particular image (or try to, at least). A new contender, called IdentifyFonts (original naming there!), recently came into this same space. Since they are so similar, I felt a head-to-head comparison would be the obvious thing to ...

You know those tests that you have to fill out when signing up for new web services? The ones that ask you to enter the text you see in a box to prove that you're human? Those are called CAPTCHAs. And a company called reCAPTCHA does something really interesting with them. It finds hard-to-read text scanned from old newspapers and books. Because the ink and paper isn't in such good shape, ...

Recently our sister publication, TUAW, did a series of posts about each blogger's favorite iPhone and iPod Touch apps. We thought here at Download Squad that we'd take that same approach and apply it to our favourite Windows applications. This first post is my first of three in this vein that will cover Evernote, FeedDemon, and MindManager. Evernote It seems you can't go very far online these ...

So, simple American boy meets an attractive American flatbed scanner. It is a story we have all heard a hundred times, right? What happens in the story is the boy falls in love with the scanner, pledges it all his paper and digital bliss for as long as the scanners warranty is good. So he takes the scanner home, carries it over the threshold, and plugs it into the wall and into the back of his ...