No OCR on iPad

By on November 21, 2011 in Legal Workflows, Tips

Answering reader questions today via blog post. Bill asks:

Good day.

I use Goodreader to highlight documents and briefs. Sometimes, I receive a PDF that is not in OCR format. Is there an app that will convert PDF into the OCR searchable format on my I Pad 2?

Sorry, Bill. To my knowledge you are out of luck. None of the PDF viewing or annotation apps I’m familiar with will OCR a PDF on the iPad. You’ll need to round-trip your doc back to the desktop, OCR in a program like Acrobat Professional, and then re-load the OCRed document back on your iPad. If any readers know of an app that handles the OCR, I’d love to hear about it.

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4 Responses to No OCR on iPad

  1. Finis Price November 21, 2011 at 10:42 am #

    Actually, there are a few apps that do. DocScanner and PerfectOCR do.

  2. Ilya E November 23, 2011 at 1:29 am #

    There is an app in Apple Store that has built-in high quality OCR for i-devices. It is called FotoNote (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fotonote/id403100177?mt=8). Reviews are pretty high. It is currently for iPhone only, but I can use it successfully on my iPad 2 as well. It is powered by cloud-based OCR from OCR-IT (www.ocr-it.com). In a month or so there will be a couple more apps, including a specialized app for iPad interface. The same OCR is used by several apps in Google Market for Android. If I will be able to find my way back to this post once those new apps come out, I will post more information here.

  3. Steve overton November 23, 2011 at 8:30 pm #

    I am pretty sure that Perfect OCR will do the trick. It takes high quality scans with the iPhone camera (not sure what the quality would be on the iPad), and will OCR from the scan. It will also OCR a pdf that is saved to the camera roll.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Revisiting OCR on the iPad | TabletLegal - November 25, 2011

    [...] The other day I posted a response to a reader question about whether OCR is available on the iPad. Finis Price of iPadEsq commented on that post and mentioned a couple apps for the iPhone that can do OCR. [...]