Free OCR software for Mac

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software can often cost anything upwards of $100 on the Mac so to see something completely free like DigitEyeOCR.

You often get what you pay for with these kinds of apps and the truth is that DigitEyeOCR is a poor offering but it is free and worth a try for anyone that needs to scan a document and turn it into editable text. DigitEyeOCR is a very light application that is rather slow to respond to clicks but bear with it, it gets there eventually. However, the first problem you’ll find is that hardly recognizes any image formats except GIF and BMP so you might have to convert your document first.

The general menu is the first thing you see when you start DigitEyeOCR. From left to right the first button is the About giving you info on the developers. The second is The Open Text button. At the end of a recognition, the software is supposed to create a .deo file which you can then open using this button to see how successful it was.

Next is the Recognition button which you use to browse to the document you want to scan. The output file is supposedly saved on your desktop as .deo file which as mentioned before, you open with the Open Text button. The next button is the Learn button in which you can enter unusual symbols to help DigitEyeOCR recognize text more accurately. Finally you have the Preferences button which allows you to link to a neuronal network that may be able to provide you with more accurate results. It doesn’t provide any neuronal networks to link to however which isn’t very useful at all.

The main problem is that although it seems to be working, no .deo file is ever created by the program which means there is nothing to open. Whether this is just because it has trouble recognizing the files I used or not is not clear but it renders the program close to useless.

Overall, there aren’t many free OCR recognition packages out there and although DigitEyeOCR didn’t work very well for me, credit to the developers for trying.