Often we encounter images containing some valuable information. Since image don’t allow copying the text in it, we need to write it all. But there is an alternative automated approach called Optical character recognition (OCR) with which texts in such images can be extracted and can be saved in a text. Boxoft Free OCR can use this approach efficiently to extract texts in images of multiple formats in Batch. According to the developer
Boxoft Free OCR is completely free software to help you extract text from all kinds of images. The freeware can analyze multi-column text and support multiple languages: English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque and so on. You can even scan your paper documents and then OCR content from scanned files into editable text immediately.
Features & Specifications
- 5.17 Mb installer with no digital signature.
- Installation is smooth. Desktop and Quick Launch icons are not created by default.
- Installation requires 14.6 Mb free disk space.
- After installation finish it opens a webpage for subscribing to the newsletter of the company.
- The software runs on all Windows version both 32 and 64 bit.
- Nice and use to navigate GUI.
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| Main GUI |
- Supports a wide range of image formats and also some video formats.
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| Supported Image Formats |
- It can OCR languages other than English too. For that you will need to download the appropriate language package from their webpage and then go to tessdata folder in the installation directory [C:Program FilesBoxoft Free OCRtessdata] and extract the contents of the Zip archive.
- It can even scan images using the default scanner or scan after selecting which scanner to use.
- It offers you to fit images for better viewing (Fit width, Fit Height and Reduction) and can also zoom it.
- You will also be able to Deskew, Crop and rotate image.
- You can OCR selected image or all images at once.
- You can side-by-side preview the original image with the created OCR text, with which you can edit the text.
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| Side-by-Side Comparison of the Image and OCR Text |
- The text section has inbuilt spell checker
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| In-built Spell Checker |
- You can also add custom dictionaries.
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| Installed Dictionaries |
- Boxoft Free OCR can save the OCR text as Text or as Zip.
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| Save Format |
- The software asks you for viewing their other softwares. Don’t click Ok just in flow, it will let the software to launch their software toolbox, an advertisement of the company products. So, please click ‘Cancel’ to avoid unwanted surprises.
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| ‘Ad’ during Software Exit |
Also this it sets Boxoft Tools at startup. To disable that from running at startup, open Run, type msconfig, click OK. Now go to the Startup tab of opened System Configuration, clear the box on Boxoft Tools and press OK.
- Resource usage of the software is minimal.
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| System Resource Usage at Idle Time |
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| System Resource Usage during OCR Process |
My Verdict
Excellent Freeware no doubt. Like every OCR software you will not be able to get best results unless the image is itself very clear. Anyway features like Side-by-Side Comparison, Spell Checking, Cropping Image, Deskew, Rotate image, Batch Processing and a wide range of supported image format support makes the software even more versatile. Minimal system resource usage is a bonus.
Help documentation is not available. It is grayed out in the GUI and in the webpage gives reference to a wrong product. But a Video Demo is available online.
I have also made a video demonstration for your convenience and for better exploration the features of the software.
Download
Download the software from the following link
http://www.boxoft.com/free-ocr/setup(free-ocr).exe
CRC-32: 6484e414
MD4: c5e4f8769dda13566b53ead216405c7a
MD5: 15ad7f916675f9d55a85e6264dd15ce9
SHA-1: 6b96782dfdbb858c91f7c790278f22559667583b
Cheers !!