OCR on the Go

Perhaps you bought a portable scanner (see Portable Scanners) to take on business trips. That’s great, but you can’t always have your scanner with you. And even if you did, it wouldn’t help with documents that won’t fit in it—menus, posters, billboards, street signs, and so on. But all these and more are still fair game for capture and OCR. You just need a digital camera (which could be the one in your iPhone, iPad, or other mobile device) and an app to do the necessary processing. With the right mobile tools, you may find yourself scanning receipts and business cards on the spot.

Learn about Pocket-sized OCR Tools

Very likely you have a device in your pocket that includes a camera, a wireless network connection, and the capability of running third-party software. If so, you can do many of the same things you can do with a desktop or portable scanner and OCR software, and in fact you can do a few cool things more easily. For example:

  • You can store photos of business cards, receipts, signs, posters, billboards, and the like in the cloud, and be able to search their text along with all your other notes and documents.
  • You can photograph large or awkwardly shaped documents and perform OCR on them almost instantly.
  • You can snap a picture of a menu at a French restaurant and, a few seconds later, get an English translation.
  • You can capture an image of something containing text and have that text read to you by a synthesized voice. (Sometimes, you can even combine this with translation!)

These sorts of tools are great for travelers, especially those who spend time in places where they don’t read the local language well. But they’re useful for anyone who, from time to time, wants to create a searchable record of something they can’t put through a scanner.

I should mention that in many cases, apps that run on mobile devices don’t produce searchable PDFs as such. The data may be stored in some other format, or you may need to use a proprietary system for searching it. Even so, such apps offer enormous advantages.

Pick an iOS Scanning App

In my household, all the mobile data gadgets are made by Apple, so I’m most familiar with apps that run under iOS. And there are hun­dreds upon hundreds of iOS apps that offer mobile scanning features of one sort or another.

However, not all mobile scanning apps are created equal. For example, some create PDFs but don’t perform OCR to make them searchable; others do perform OCR but create only plain text files, not PDFs. Some work on both iPhones and iPads; others are iPhone-only. And some have special features that focus on business cards or receipts. So, be sure to read the fine print when considering which apps to buy.

Although I can’t begin to do justice to the huge range of iOS apps in this category, here are a few representative examples out of many hundreds, divided into broad groups.

Business Card Scanner Apps

Dozens of apps let you snap a photo of a business card and extract the content to your Contacts app. Examples include:

Receipt Scanner Apps

If your main need is to scan receipts on the go—not necessarily to create searchable PDFs but to capture the data for expense reports and the like—try an app like one of these:

Document Scanner Apps

For replacing a portable scanner, perhaps the most important category is general-purpose scanning apps, which are designed for full-size pages but in some cases also have special support for business cards. All those listed here are universal (work on iPhone and iPad) and can create multi-page searchable PDFs as well as enhancing the images of scanned pages (for example, deskewing them and improving contrast):

Scanner-specific Apps

Several scanner manufacturers offer iOS apps that let you extend the scanner’s capabilities in various ways. For example:

  • Brother iPrint&Scan: For owners of Brother all-in-one (print/scan/copy/fax) devices, this app lets you connect to the device from your iOS device for scanning or printing.
  • IRIScan Book: A companion to the IRIScan Book Executive 3 wand scanner, this app sends scanned images via Wi-Fi to an iOS device.
  • Neat for iOS: This app is free, but requires a paid subscription to the NeatCloud service. It lets you snap photos of receipts, business cards, and the like, apply OCR (with optional human verification, at an additional cost), and import them to Neat for Mac via NeatCloud. You can also use the app to sync and view your other Neat documents.
  • ScanSnap Connect Application: This app lets you scan documents from your Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 or iX100 directly to your iOS device over Wi-Fi.
  • Xerox DocToMe: Much like IRIScan Book and ScanSnap Connect, this app for users of the Xerox Mobile Scanner lets you scan docu­ments directly to an iOS device over Wi-Fi.

Document Management Apps

In Use a Document Manager, I mentioned several desktop document managers that come in iOS versions such that you can sync searchable PDFs and other files between devices. In some cases, notably DEVONthink To Go, the capabilities extend to mobile scanning in the sense that you can take a photo in the app, sync it to your Mac, and there convert it to a searchable PDF. (And Neat for iOS, mentioned in the previous list, also counts as a document manager.)

Use Android Devices

If you have a smartphone or tablet that runs Android, you still have numerous options. Just a smattering of examples:

Use Your Digital Camera

If you don’t have a smartphone, or if its camera isn’t of sufficient quality for the results you want, you can snap a picture with any digital camera, upload it to your Mac, and run it through your favorite OCR software to produce a searchable PDF.

However, let me offer a few tips:

  • Make sure you have stand-alone OCR software. When scanner manufacturers bundle third-party OCR software, often it’s intentionally crippled in such a way that it works only with scans made by that scanner, and won’t process other files you throw at it. If you buy OCR software on its own, it won’t have this limitation.
  • Watch image quality. Make sure your subject is well-lit, in focus, and photographed from as straight an angle as you can manage. A tripod can help with this. (Some cameras also helpfully show a grid on screen to help you align your subject.)
  • Zoom. Compose your image so that the text you want to recognize fills as much of the frame as possible; this provides more pixels for your OCR software to work with.
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