OCRKit

I noticed that this was still on sale so just bought it, but now noticed there is also a Pro version, but do not see Pro version on sale, which is weird since only a $10 difference normally. I would have opted for Pro version if it was an option.

Tested this while I was pondering purchase. Seems to make quite a lot of mistakes, maybe every third word has an error when ocring rather clear 11 pt Arial text. Seems there is no vocabulary in target language (while app claims to support finnish). If you have access to Acrobat it makes better ocr. Formatting is good and clear if you need just text.

I tested OCRKit (Pro) and here is what I found: Pros: - App just starts and creates the output file (may be useful for batch processing). Cons: - There is no documentation for app preferences. You should figure out each option by yourself. - RTF and HTML outputs produce unformatted text. Only PDF output preserves formatting, but you can't fix any errors as well. - Most of the resulting PDFs are just image PDFs and even if some words are recognized, PDF is not searchable. - If you need to OCR image PDFs or screenshot images made on a 1080p display, then just look for another OCR software. - There are no options to teach the app about screen fonts used in the image, so it may produce better results. - There is no Preview or some kind of Editor. What should I do with all those poorly recognized PDFs. I may easily fix RTF or HTML output, but without preserved text formatting, they are useless. - For the price of $50 (or $60 for the Pro version) one would expect to receive a decent product, not just a command line utility with only a few options. My recommendation is first test this app, before going to purchase it.

They went from version 2.14 to version 15.11?? in just over a month? Probably changing the way their version numbering works.

OCRKit meanwhile has been upped to version 2.14 on 2015-08-14. Cheers, Holger

ExactCODE is offering version 2.9 for download on their site.

OCRKit auto-updated itself to version 2.6.1 today. Just so you know. Cheers, Holger

works great for me

OCR Kit does as good a job as any OCR product on the Mac. Compared to using Adobe Acrobat on a PC, its accuracy is similar, although its features are less. Comparing prices, there's no comparison. While it may take a few minutes to learn OCR kit, there is little to do for single document conversion and it is very reliable. I like it a lot, and it is the only reason I can do OCR on my Mac. Thanks for a nice product.

I've purchased quite a few licenses for OCR applications in the last couple of months, and all of these products have something going for them, but OCRKit stands out for at least two reasons: a) OCRKit can be invoked in an automated, i.e. "batch", fashion. b) OCRKit is able to preserve CCITT Group 4 compression in scanned images, at least in some cases. This finally gives me output files which have the exact same image quality as the original and are only marginally bigger due to the added text content. Kudos! OCRKit is not perfectly straightforward to use IMHO and could definitely use a better documentation, though. Regarding the recognition accuracy: I have been able to obtain very good results with OCRKit provided that the quality of the scanned image is high. In other cases the recognized text will contain errors, as with any other OCR software. OCRKit is said to be able to utilize a dictionary for better results, but it seems to me that this does not yet work in all cases. So overall I am quite impressed with OCRKit, but improvements are of cause welcome. I hope the developers continue to bring their app forward, it has a lot of potential. Please also see my comments added to the review of "brianvon" right below.

Bloatware, takes my 1 MB file and at MINIMUM file size expands it to nearly 10 MB. Under higher quality settings it bloats the pdf 33x larger. Spell correction does not work well. It took an easily readable word "confirmation" --> "confirmatioIL" And that was with dictionary turned on! try again

I downloaded the demo and ran it on some very difficult documents - poorly made scans, documents with lots of wild fonts, etc. It performed relatively well. I ran it on a PDF i created by removing the text from commercially produced PDF (I exported it to .png, then exported again to PDF in Preview) and it was flawless. It was surprisingly quick on my 5 year old Mac Mini. The verdict - well worth the price. When I saw the PDFs it produces, they are SO much nicer than the CRAZY MS Word docs produced by Adobe Acrobat (they consist of zillions of text boxes and other strange items, not straightforward text and pictures). All in all, what does more for anywhere near this price? Acrobat has a few tricks this doesn't do (for example, editing PDFs, but with great difficulty), but OCRKit is so much nicer to use.

The program works at about the same speed as Acrobat but is far easier to use. I was hoping it would not affect the images within my scanned PDF files, but it appears to have degraded them more than Acrobat -- not a huge deal for some purposes, but it makes me wonder why I can't make a PDF file searchable without changing the images in it.

I just tried the 14 day demo, but the program is acting weird. When it scanned a pdf document, all it did was produce really strange text characters and showed no OCR results: ’1ì*—Á Ö-bîe+PýæàfŽ§V~ÎM=nTø+ÐxÎX¤äˆ]\°äVoŠ¥ð”–´·V³]ÎKmÏݯðšQqãûë˜Üì‘$8ÆG&¸ÿØ\GâIÞgË3ýÓҋ?z¬åÝ}ðüeoÎcVÞ~@;fº¥‘„B}k–ø}‰ü±cˁ“ƒÖº¥LX;R;òø§Oqç̉†ä‰A‘Ãô °ÎNp)ŎуÅ{°C©8µ$k¿°@;.!‡p®Ñò!Âdç©=ªYHS—S´ÓbîzQp ³‘õ¦H‘ýì¬l

This app works great! It is super fast when scanning big documents. It also allows for text recognition within the images of my file which is a great feature!

So far, I'm very pleased. I had been using PDFPen, but it repeatedly crashes or freezes. In my limited experience with OCRKit it has performed flawlessly (on a 22-page document that consistently made PDFPen crash).

Ah...I didn't need to give my email and this is not a demo. I just bought a Mac running Lion and of course my older, expensive, Omni Page OCR software was no longer supported due to Apple asinine decision to drop Rosetta emulation. So, I had to scramble to find a quick and cheap alternative and wow, this did the job! For Free! I also downloaded OCRTools from the app store for $4.99 and than worked well also, maybe just sightly better.

What? You cannot download the demo without giving them your email address? Lame. No thanks, there're plenty of other choices.

Apparently, this software does *not* run on PPC.

Preview is searchable and text selectable --- what does this do that preview does not?