TopOCR 4.2

TopOCR is a free OCR (optical character recognition) software. This kind of programs are used for recognizing text from pictures and transferring it to a normal text document. TopOCR capable of recognizing 11 languages. As far as English is concerned, I have to say that the program does a pretty nice job.

The program's user interface is composed of two panels. The left side is used for opening and viewing the source picture. You can use the main menu on top to acquire a new image from a scanner or camera that's installed on your system. It's also possible to sharpen, scale, rotate, and do other processing on any image that you open. The right side displays a wordpad-like text editor, which allows you to modify the text that's recognized from the source pictures.

Supported output formats include PDF, HTML, RTF, and plain text. I guess it's worth mentioning that the application can process mixed text and graphics. I tried "decoding" the picture of a scanned page written in Arial 11px font. The program was about 95% accurate. Next, I tried it with a picture of the same page rotated about 3 degrees. The results were not very satisfying, so I recommend you take the time to arrange the pages correctly in your scanner.

Pluses: TopOCR has built-in support for text-to-speech, so it's able to read the text it recognizes.

Drawbacks / flaws: The application is quite unstable. I had to restart the program a couple of times because no matter what I did, it kept showing a "Bad Data" message. Another drawback is that TopOCR doesn't support batch operations.

In conclusion: Did I say that this program is freeware? Well, it is, and in my opinion it's definitely worth a try.

version reviewed: 2.5