The project is still under development but an interface for Windows is non-existent. It doesn't work on my system (WinXP 32bit SP3) so apparrently I have to get Visual Studio and build from source (no thanks).
It also appears that you can't download the old version, which was at least somewhat useful.
1.5
http://www.portablefreeware.com/?sc=185
2.04
new website: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
New name: Tesseract OCR
New license: Open Source / Apache
If anyone has a link to the old download, that might be helpful. There is only one portable OCR program on PFC.
Another (dead? living?) project: Softi FreeOCR
Re: Another (dead? living?) project: Softi FreeOCR
Give TopOCR (www.topocr.com) a try. It's free, and in my experience it is significantly more accurate than FreeOCR. It appears to be portable and I don't see any registry entries or user app data files, which is more than I can say for FreeOCR.
Re: Another (dead? living?) project: Softi FreeOCR
Impressions ...
Functionality:
* Worked beautifully with a very clearly type-written page. One or two minor mistakes is good for even quality, commercial software. Admittedly better than the Softi FreeOCR product.
* Sort of turned to nonsense when confronted with tables but could still make out some of the text inside said tables, which is okay.
* Processed pretty fast
* Does work with TIFF files (as well as GIF, JPEG, and BMP)
Bad:
* Couldn't see or understand handwriting in the least. Didn't seem to try.
* Not very portable -- created the file C:\WINDOWS\topocr.INI ... it saved something to the registry although I'm not sure what.
* Doesn't seem to work with PDFs
If the non-portable elements aren't too bad, it looks like a good replacement. Thanks Jarte!
Functionality:
* Worked beautifully with a very clearly type-written page. One or two minor mistakes is good for even quality, commercial software. Admittedly better than the Softi FreeOCR product.
* Sort of turned to nonsense when confronted with tables but could still make out some of the text inside said tables, which is okay.
* Processed pretty fast
* Does work with TIFF files (as well as GIF, JPEG, and BMP)
Bad:
* Couldn't see or understand handwriting in the least. Didn't seem to try.
* Not very portable -- created the file C:\WINDOWS\topocr.INI ... it saved something to the registry although I'm not sure what.
* Doesn't seem to work with PDFs
If the non-portable elements aren't too bad, it looks like a good replacement. Thanks Jarte!
Re: Another (dead? living?) project: Softi FreeOCR
After a really warm review by FWG, I took another look at FreeOCR:
Evidently its .NET and at 3.0 right now over on Softpedia, but the Softpedia's listed author website doesn't list it. FWG is listing paperfile.net as the home page and it looks the same.
It doesn't look like the underlying OCR program is any different so linking to the 1.5 version seems fine to me. The underlying engine Tesseract has continued development since then, but is command-line so I looked into a few front-ends:
Evidently its .NET and at 3.0 right now over on Softpedia, but the Softpedia's listed author website doesn't list it. FWG is listing paperfile.net as the home page and it looks the same.
It doesn't look like the underlying OCR program is any different so linking to the 1.5 version seems fine to me. The underlying engine Tesseract has continued development since then, but is command-line so I looked into a few front-ends:
- There's gImageReader, which is cross-platform and GPL'd so I'll likely test that out.
- One available (not portable) front-end (with a ton of other goodies) that's won awards is the Qiqqa program, but also requires dotNET and has a closed license.