OCR feature

[BjoernH]

Dear Affinity Team,

first of all, I think that you've done a great job with affinity designer & photo and I was very happy to discover cost efficient professional alternatives to adobe products! I've been anticipating the release of affinity publisher and now that the beta is available i would like to request a image-to-text (OCR) conversion-feature, since this is something I struggle with on a weekly basis in my work.

Thank you for all the hard work.

Best wishes

Bjoern

[Fixx]

Would it not be better to use dedicated app for this? I get my scans as PDF from scanner/printer and open them in direct to (old) Acrobat which does very good OCR.

[Seneca]

6 hours ago, BjoernH said:

i would like to request a image-to-text (OCR) conversion-feature,

I'm not sure whether OCR belongs to a DTP application. I agree with @Fixx on that.

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, Seneca said:

I'm not sure whether OCR belongs to a DTP application. I agree with @Fixx on that.

I’m in two minds about this. My immediate reaction was to say that I agree, too, but then I thought about the fact that PDF-XChange Editor helpfully includes an OCR function to deal with the many PDF ‘text’ files which actually just contain images of text. I think there is a case for a DTP app to be equipped to handle such scenarios.

[Old Bruce]

OCR is hard. Affinity has enough to do right now. Hire someone today and she can give you something worthwhile in two-three years, five tops. Eight at the outside if you want to use it for more than one language.  I would rather deal with OCR software sold separately,

[Seneca]

17 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

OCR is hard.

We already have quite a number of both free and paid for software that do the OCR extremely well. I don't think that Affinity would bring anything new to the table.

Having said that, in the fullness of time, when we have plug-in support in Affinity product OCR is a very good candidate for an extension.

[Old Bruce]

2 minutes ago, Seneca said:

We already have quite a number of both free and pay for software that do the OCR extremely well. I don't think that Affinity would bring anything new to the table.

Having said that, in the fullness of time, when we have plug-in support in Affinity product OCR is a very good candidate for an extension.

I am not against it, I just prefer horses for courses. Granted I do wind up with a bigger feed bill.

[Michail]

20 hours ago, Fixx said:

Would it not be better to use dedicated app for this? I get my scans as PDF from scanner/printer and open them in direct to (old) Acrobat which does very good OCR.

I agree with you. OCR does not belong in publication software. But Adobe was a very bad example. Exactly from this company we want to get away here! One of several alternatives to Acrobat in my opinion would be PDF-XChange Editor.

[artistram3d1]

I think that an OCR feature would be a great addition to Affinity software but do realize that it would take quite a while to implement. As a recent Affinity convert (I don't like Adobe's subscription fees) I don't have full editing capabilities in Acrobat anymore. I also don't have an older version of Acrobat to use. 

If someone could suggest a standalone OCR program (NOT Adobe) I would be very grateful.

GO AFFINITY!!!

[Guest]

1 hour ago, artistram3d1 said:

If someone could suggest a standalone OCR program (NOT Adobe) I would be very grateful.

I use Abbyy FineReader https://pdf.abbyy.com (Mac/Win) within DevonThink Pro which converts PDFs (including embedded images) into rtf, Word, etc. The results are pretty good, and typically require minimal clean-up depending on the quality of the embedded images.

[artistram3d1]

4 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

I use Abbyy FineReader https://pdf.abbyy.com (Mac/Win) within DevonThink Pro which converts PDFs (including embedded images) into rtf, Word, etc. The results are pretty good, and typically require minimal clean-up depending on the quality of the embedded images.

Thanks so much, very appreciated!