Lynne Tatlock’s effort to text-mine the German editions and adaptations of Jane Eyre, and many of my explanations are influenced by the needs of this project. My experience with OCR has been primarily limited to the work required for Prof. But even with the commercial software, one's mileage may vary significantly depending on the language of the texts one is confronting, the condition of the books one hopes to convert, and the font in which they are printed. For those interested in using commercial OCR software, ABBYY Finereader is a good place to start.

Additionally, we prefer open-source software solutions because proprietary software is not always easily available and we find that open source software is best for running batch OCR on the scale required for our purposes. There are many commercial options available and it would be difficult to do any justice to them since that is not the main goal of this guide. This overview will not cover commercially available OCR to any great extent, but will instead survey the currently available open-source software and explain how to use it. OCR software as we know it today has been in development since roughly the mid-1980s. Later, in the 1970s, a form of OCR that enabled computers to read texts aloud was developed to assist blind people with reading.

The history of OCR goes back to the early decades of the twentieth century when “reading machines” transcribed text into telegraph code, for example.

OCR software converts images of typed or printed text into digital text files that can then be manipulated and used for various forms of text mining.

Open source ocr for mac