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ABBYY Screenshot Reader free Christmas promotion.
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Posted by ddalian
Dec 13, 2011 at 06:49 PM
I have never posted anything here before but I have read and learned a great deal from the forum. I don’t feel quite as alone knowing that others share my software addiction and relentless pursuit of the perfect information management system. I realize that this post may be a bit off topic but an information organizer is only useful if you have information to organize. That being said the ABBYY screenshot reader is an excellent tool for collecting usable text from anything that appears on your screen. If you can capture it will try to make it into editable text and it does a fine job of it usually. ABBYY is offering the software for free as a Christmas promotion. I am not sure how long the deal will last and they do ask you for some personal information. This was not a problem for me as I use another one of their products and they already had my info.(They have never bothered me with anything other than update alerts). I do not work for the company. If you follow the link just click on the bonus offer at the bottom of the page and follow the directions.
http://www.abbyy.com/screenshot_reader/
Happy Holidays
ddalian
Posted by Slartibartfarst
Dec 14, 2011 at 01:12 AM
Many thanks for this.tip ddalion.
I use this tool and it has shown itself to be a brilliant additional info-gathering device.
I have copied your post and its links to DonationCoder forum: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=29270.msg271367#msg271367
- where I suspect there will be several people who would like to take advantage of the free offer.
Posted by dan7000
Dec 14, 2011 at 07:17 PM
Thanks for the tip - I’ve been looking for something like this.
For those wondering what the big deal is: This software does OCR of screen captures. Most screen grabbing programs just capture text or images, but don’t do OCR. Some programs claim to convert windows to editable text, but really they only work on dialog boxes or other windows that have unselectable text—they do not do OCR on images.
I need this all the time, because I regularly copy text from PDFs with columns. Unfortunately, the built-in OCR in Acrobat does not deal with columns well, so if you rely on the native OCR you often cannot select text from just one column - you end up with lines from both columns interspersed with one another.
ABBYY software does a great job of letting me select any rectangular area of the screen - including a column in a PDF - and OCRing it on the spot before dumping the text into the clipboard. Very nice. The only thing I would add is a global hotkey, which seems to be missing - currently I have to right-click on the system tray before I can capture anything.
Posted by Slartibartfarst
Dec 14, 2011 at 09:38 PM
+ 1 for what @dan7000 wrote.
I think AutoHotKey could be used to create a Hotkey for ABBY SR.
I have been using ABBY SR since it came bundled with scanner software for a new EPSON scanner that I bought several months ago. It captures either ordinary text that is in a window on the screen (basic clipboard function), or OCRs text from an image that you take a clip of. Either process takes a few clicks of the mouse, but it works well.
The OCR process bit though is very good, and I am unaware of any other clipping tool that does that so easily and effectively.
An exception might be the OneNote screen clipping tool, which captures an area of the screen and saves it as an image in a Notebook. You can then right click on the image to OCR and extract any text in the image, which gets saved to the Clipboard. This process is a bit more roundabout than using ABBY SR, if the text is all you want from the image, but it’s unique to NoteBook (AFAIK) in that, if you *keep* the clip image in the Notebook, then the text in the image is always found in a text search of your notebooks - i.e., the text in the image is data in your Notebooks.
That - having embedded text in images form part of your searchable data - is also one of the advantages of online Evernote (apparently the client-based offline Evernote does not offer that facility, presumably because, if it did, it could tend to make parts of the online service redundant or at least could potentially reduce their business model benefits).
Posted by dan7000
Dec 14, 2011 at 11:28 PM
To clarify about Evernote: you can actually search text of images in the offline clients. But OCRing only occurs when you sync an image to the server—OCR happens on the server not the client. Once you have synced the local client software to the server, then you can search your images locally even if you are not connected to the internet.
Yes, I believe the online-only OCR is something they have imposed to make sure that people maintain their subscriptions to the online service. They previously had OCR performed locally, so clearly its not a technical limitation. But theoretically if you just want to search your old, previously-OCR’d documents, you can just dump the service and keep searching your documents locally for free forever.