PDF XChange Forum

Gave the new .200 a test drive, with its OCR.

Just a few observations:
1. Overall, a very helpful and effective feature. I will be able to uninstall another free program that I use, just to get PDFs converted to text quickly. Yours does it in house, so to speak. It was almost as good as MS OneNOte's OCR, which has been head and shoulders above any free OCR out there (but of course, MS charges a bit more for Office than you do, for your program ).

2. I've never used a free OCR program that didn't give me output of some kind, in a visible window. Now this isn't' a complaint, but some of your users might not realize that after that "processing pages, please wait" window closes, that the page is available to be copied and pasted. You might get a few queries about it not working at all. I don't know if you can have the window blink a bit, like a browser download helper app will do, when a download has finished... just a suggestion, for purposes of letting your users know that the operation has been completed. Or perhaps, enable this with an option to switch this off, if you don't want the program to let you know....

3. It seemed to have fewer problems recognizing letters of text than OneNote, but more problems inserting some random character when no character was there, in the original PDF image.

Overall, like I said, a great idea as I use OCR on PDFs often. You've succeeded at making a great product even better. At some point, you'll make me buy your pro version just because I feel so guilty using your free program all these years, but I'm not there yet.

Hi prr,

Thank you for your kind words and suggestions, your comments will be of course passed on to our OCR developer for consideration upon his return next week.

Best,
Chris

First, I would like to say how impressed I was with the great OCR results I obtained for a neary 900 page scanned document.
Kudos for the development team!

I too, have a few observations.
1. The "OCR Pages" window has an "OK" button. This is inconsistent with other windows such as the "Print", and "Export" buttons in their respective windows. I was a little surprised when the OK button launched an hours-long OCR process. Perhaps the "OK" chould be changed to "Process", or something else which suggests action?

2. The "Procesing pages" window, with the progress bar-graph has a "Cancel" button which is, apparently, permenently grayed-out, and inactive. I didn't see any other way of stopping the OCR process.

3. While the OCR process is running, the main PDF-XChange Viewer window is fixed on the screen. It cannot be used, moved, resized, minimized, or closed. (I tried) If I remember to, I can always move the window mostly off-screen before running a OCR on a large document, but if it can't be used, I think that it would be useful to have an option to automatically minimize the window while OCR is running.

Please understand these are not meant as complaints, just small suggestions for improving a very useful, new feature.

Regards,
Larry

Thanks for the comments Larry,

I will pass them to the guys working on the OCR - and we will certainly consider them.

Best,
Stefan

Thanks for the useful observations. The disabled cancel button was an oversight and has been fixed for the next build. I can't say exactly when it will be available but it won't be long.

The other issue of not being able to move the window will be resolved at some point.

Features needed:
-cancel button
-ocr to work in background
- multi-threaded ocr (I sure it could split its work into pages, example 50 pages on one core, and another 50 on second core)

Hello dzid_,

Your voice is heard! We are definitely considering all of these!

Best,
Stefan

dzid_ wrote:Features needed:
-cancel button
-ocr to work in background
- multi-threaded ocr (I sure it could split its work into pages, example 50 pages on one core, and another 50 on second core)

The cancel button is fixed and will be out with the next build. Background OCR and multithreading are things we are planning, but it's an issue of prioritizing this vs. the new product release and it may not be available until version 3.


-Walter

Hi,
Is it possible to process multiple pdf files at once or is there any cmd line option or something? I need to extract the text from lots of pdf files and it is difficult to open every single pdf file.
Thank you.

Sorry for my previous message. I saw later:

currently the free OCR is only intended for use through the GUI so no batch processing at this time

Walter-Tracker Supp wrote:Background OCR and multithreading are things we are planning, but it's an issue of prioritizing this vs. the new product release and it may not be available until version 3.

For me OCR is a very welcome icing on the cake and fortunately I don't really need it often. But when I do it is a bit odd to see only 1 out of 8 logic cores being utilized even in documents spanning several hundred pages. Personally I wouldn't mind if a very simple implementation/improvement would be made in order to get multi-threading out sooner. Something like 1 thread/core per page.

Anyway, thanks for this great and even free feature! You saved me buying a simple third-party OCR solution just for the few times where I need OCR in PDFs.

Hello Timur,

Welcome to our forums and thanks for your comment.
Our OCR tools is still quite "young" and as you have correctly noticed it's a single thread process for now, but you can be sure we are working on improvements in this area!

A much more advanced version of our OCR tool is planned to be released with v3 of our Viewer.

Best,
Stefan

Hi Stefan,

thanks for the warm welcome. Good to know that multi-threading is already in the works. Good success for the future!