Example 2

OCR'ing a 2 column document with photo

This is a PDF with a fake UFO report you can download the file HERE if you want to try (you may need to right-click and choose 'save link as' or 'save target as'

Just pressing the OCR button would be useless on this example because although we would get random characters when OCR'ing the photo it would also mix up the 2 columns into one so for this example using the selection tool is a must!

I am going to use MS Word to recreate the document but you could use Open Office or publisher, in fact any program that supports columns and photos.

1) now to start off I am just going to OCR the page title (yes that is a bit lazy as I could have just typed the title in)

2) Then press the Export to Word button which will open up a new document with the title in it, if you are not using Word then just open a new document and copy and paste the text.

3) Next I have selected and OCR'ed the first column also I pressed the 'remove line breaks button' then in Word created a new Text Box (Insert menu on Word) and copy and pasted the text into it as shown below.

FreeOCR

MS Word

4) Now clear the text window and do the same for the second column

FreeOCR

MS Word

5) Now draw a box around the photo to select the image, then press the selection button and choose
'Copy selection to clipboard' this will place the selected image onto the Windows clipboard so now we can just paste the image into Word (Tip: paste the image into a text box then you can position it easily)

FreeOCR

MS Word

Now we have all of the text and images in Word you can play around positioning the text boxes and adjusting the font sizes to suit and don't forget to do a final proof read and spell check.

As you can see there is a manual element of work envolved to get the best out of FreeOCR but I am sure you will find it easier than recreating a document from scratch.

We hope you enjoy using FreeOCR