LibGuides: OCR Tools: Getting Started

Easy-to-Use Tools

There are a variety of free, easy-to-use tools to help you get started with OCR. The list below contains a brief list of such tools that can be used for simple OCR transcription.

In-browser OCR
A simple web app to perform OCR on images hosted online.
Ocrad.js
OCR in pure Javascript.
ABBYY PDF Scanner
A free OCR app for the iPhone.

Tutorials

Adobe Acrobat
A guide from the University of Illinois on performing basic OCR using Adobe Acrobat.
Google Cloud
A guide from Google on using the company's cloud platform to perform OCR.
Google Drive
A tutorial on performing OCR using Google Drive.
PyTesseract Tutorial
A tutorial on the PyTesseract wrapper for the Tesseract API.