I downloaded the OCRKit software to convert a 326 page genealogy text from an image-based pdf to text. My document had a lot of footnotes and complicated formatting. OCRKit did a reasonable job of converting this large complicated file into text. I had tried using Google Docs previously and had no luck at all, even breaking the book into smaller bits. The conversion process was not perfect, as a number of words (probably in the 5% range) were misspelled, but at least the majority of the document came through intact, so I’m pleased.OCRKit also allows you the option of converting an image-based pdf into a text based pdf, which looks exactly like the original. Not all the embedded text will be converted perfectly, but it should allow searching for the text that is converted properly.

I’m a graduate student with a TON of PDFs that were unsearchable…and basically unuseable for my purposes, if I was hunting for one half-remembered phrase in a 500-page document. The OCR conversion is very very good. Worth the money. I work with documents in English, French and Spanish and as long as I make sure to set the language before processing it works very well. It even manages to muddle through 16th century Spanish in PDFs of 19th century books, which has been very helpful to me (obviously not with the same accuracy as modern Spanish, but then, I wouldn’t expect it to). And this is the kicker: it managed to catch enough of the Nahuatl (indigenous Mexican language) in my Nahuatl-English texts to make both languages searchable! Again, the accuracy isn’t perfect, but it’s far more than I was expecting. The program has only failed me twice, both times for documents that contained large images distributed throughout the texts (think an article with a few maps and illustrations). The pages that had illustrations with text just came out blank. I have no idea why that happened with those files in particular…generally, it doesn’t seem to have a problem with PDFs with mixed texts and images, but I figure it’s worth noting. Thanks for such a great, life-and-thesis-saving program!

I dragged a PDF contaning the scan of a 120 page report (with tables and graphics) onto the icon for OCRKit, and within a minute itreturned a PDF that let me select and copy text everywhere in the PDF and search through the text in Preview (or any other PDF software). The original font, layout, graphics, and tables were perfectly preserved. OCRKit adds a text layer to the sanned PDF file so there is no loss of design or formatting. Even text in charts and tables is searchable and can be copied and pasted (handy for pulling data out of tables, but that will take a bit of manual work depending on the design of the table).You can also export just the text, but making a scanned document into a searchable PDF (with text that can be copied and pasted) is the strength of the program.If you want to end up with a Word file that retains the graphics and layout of the scanned document, OCRKit is not a good choice. Gettin from a scanned image in a PDF back to an editable Word document that retains graphics and formatting is not the purpose of the software.I you want to scan a bunch of documents to reduce paper and have a searchable archive on your computer then this works perfectly. However, the document size can get large: the resulting PDF has both a scanned image and the text associated with it. OCRKit does provide compressed and highly compressed output, however. It makes PDFs that are smaller than the original scanned PDF and that retain the detail and clarity.It is perfect for what it sets out to do.

OCRKit sort of works but not really. You will have to do extensive editing to your converted files to make them understandable. I wasted my money on this app. After a couple of tries I had to find something else or spend hours correcting it's mistakes. I went and bought another program. For $10 dollars more than OCRKit I found Readiris 17 which works much much better.