Topic awaiting preservation: OCR Software / Plugin for Photoshop

Is there anyway to OCR from photoshop? -or- any recommendations for freeware ocr applications? Currently, I use photoshop to scan in business cards and then save them to disk, but would like a way to select like the contact name and address for recognition.

Karl..

at work i have a machine that is desgined exactly for that. It scans in the card and ocr's it. I'll get the name on monday when i go back to work.

There really isn't any real good "free" ocr software. lots that you can pay good bucks for, but not really free. I've never seen a plugin for OCRing from photoshop.

Later,

C:\

Not seen any free OCR software, but my HP scanner came with it installed.

Adobe Acrobat Professional can do OCR. it's not free, but there is a 30-day trial.

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/main.html

Thanks for the tips!

http://jocr.sourceforge.net/ (really GOCR, but sf already had a "gocr")
http://www.gnu.org/software/ocrad/ocrad.html
http://geocities.com/claraocr/

I've tried GOCR & Ocrad and they were both decent. I imagine when I finally get through the man pages and fine tune them they'll be better.

(Edited by reisio on 01-08-2006 01:29)

Resio, following the linke to the gnu software. I'm FTP'd in but the files in this folder look strange to me. Is this something that I can install on Windows? The directory is filled with a bunch of tar.bz2 files.

Thanks.
Karl..

Ocrad and Clara OCR look like they're only available as source tarballs, and you'll probably need Cygwin or something to easily run them on Windows. GOCR has Windows binaries, though - did you try that one yet? How's it fair?

Currently, tryng Adobe Reader Pro. No luck so far, it doesn't appear to be working.
I'll try GOCR now.

GOCR is cool. Will need a way to figure out how to batch a directory full of JPG cards. Anyone good at writing .bat files? Also, I'm wondering if there is a way to tweak the JPG conversion to convert it *better* to improve the OCR. Right now, not so good. Any ideas?

Acrobat Pro is ok, but no way to batch the process (that I could see).

Karl..

IrfanView?