Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs

An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."

Comments

Re:commercial?

[ganjadude]

there is! I happen to work for a company (shameless plug) called DocuWare. Its document management software that does all of that., we are not in 24/7 we are in 8 AM-8 PM eastern m-f for support (I am the support) at the corporate level, however we sell through a dealer network that provides support on a contract basis (many Toshiba business solutions are resellers for us, I know they are 24X7) www.docuware.com