7 tools for OCR online and offline

1. Office Lens

Platforms: Android, iOS, Windows.
Recognizes: camera shots.
Saves: DOCX, PPTX, PDF.

This service from Microsoft turns a smartphone or PC camera into a free document scanner. With Office Lens, you can recognize text on any physical medium and save it in one of the "office" formats or PDF. The resulting text files are editable in Word, OneNote, and other Microsoft services integrated with Office Lens. Unfortunately, the program does not cope with the Russian language as well as with the English one.

2. Adobe Scan

Platforms: Android, iOS.
Recognizes: camera shots.
Saves: PDF.

Adobe Scan also uses a smartphone camera to scan paper documents, but only saves copies in PDF format. The app is completely free. It is convenient to export the results to the cross-platform service Adobe Acrobat, which allows you to edit PDF-files: highlight, underline and strikeout words, search in text and add comments.

3. FineReader

Platforms: web, Android, iOS, Windows.
Recognizes: JPG, TIF, BMP, PNG, PDF, camera shots.
Saves: DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, ODT, TXT, RTF, PDF, PDF / A, PPTX, EPUB, FB2.

FineReader is renowned for its high recognition accuracy. Alas, the free capabilities of the tool are limited: after registration, you will be allowed to scan only 10 pages. But every month they will add five more pages as a bonus. A € 129 subscription allows you to scan up to 5,000 pages per year, plus access to a desktop PDF editor.

4. Online OCR

Platforms: web.
Recognizes: JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, PCX, PDF.
Saves: TXT, DOC, DOCX, XLSX, PDF.

Web service for text and table recognition. Without registration, Online OCR allows you to convert up to 15 documents per hour - for free. By creating an account, you can scan 50 pages without time limits and unlock all output formats. For each additional page, the service asks from 0.8 cents: the more you buy, the lower the cost.

5.img2txt

Platforms: web.
Recognizes: JPEG, PNG, PDF.
Saves: PDF, TXT, DOCX, ODF.

Free online ad-powered converter. img2txt processes files quickly, but recognition accuracy is not always satisfactory. The service makes fewer mistakes if the text on the uploaded images is written in the same language, is located horizontally and is not interrupted by pictures.

6. Microsoft OneNote

Platforms: Windows, macOS.
Recognizes: popular image formats.
Saves: DOC, PDF.

The desktop version of the popular OneNote notebook also has a text recognition feature that works with images loaded into notes. If you right-click on the document snapshot and select “Copy text from picture” from the menu that appears, then all text content will appear on the clipboard. The program is available free of charge.

7. Readiris 17

Platforms: Windows, macOS.
Recognizes: JPEG, PNG, PDF and others.
Saves: PDF, TXT, PPTX, DOCX, XLSX and others.

Powerful professional PDF and OCR software. Converts documents in different languages with high accuracy, including Russian. But Readiris 17 also costs from 49 to 199 euros, depending on the number of functions. You can install a trial version that will work for free for 10 days. To do this, you need to register on the Readiris website, download the program to your computer and enter the data from your account in it.