Optical character recognition (OCR) technology is used to identify the text from the image files. Using the OCR technology, they have been able to digitize millions of old books by scanning their pages and then running the scanned imaged through OCR software. Some organizations are also doing the same with old newspaper archives that were previously stored on microfilms.
If you also have an image that you want to turn into plain text then you can use either OCR software that you have to install on your computer, or you can use an online tool called Easy Screen OCR. We previously posted about the Easy Screen OCR software, and now they also have an web app available. The benefit of using the web app version is that you don’t have to install anything on your system.
In order to start using the online version of Easy Screen OCR, you can visit their website at http://online.easyscreenocr.com/. After that you can drag-n-drop an image that you want to turn into plain text using OCR. You can upload multiple images and they are shown in a list on the website. Now you can simply click on the Upload & Convert button.
In a few seconds, it will display a download link. You can click on this download link to download a ZIP archive containing the plain text files for each of the images that had uploaded to Easy Screen OCR. Unfortunately, the name of the text files are randomly selected and do not correspond to those of the uploaded images.
In our test, it failed to properly OCR the image. We used the same image previously in their PC software and it performed the OCR successfully. But the online version failed miserably. It recognized all the background letters but could not properly identify the text in the foreground.