Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Scanners? the quick way to do it!

Android’s integrated camera app doesn’t have any OCR capabilities. You could snap a photo of your document with the camera app and call it a day, but if you want to store that document as a PDF and perform OCR on it so you can search and understand its content, you’ll want to use a specialized app.
Google Drive is one such app that’s made by Google. It has integrated document-scanning and OCR capabilities. Snap a photo of a document and a PDF copy of the document will be saved to Google Drive. It will also use the power of Google’s servers to perform OCR on the documents, making it searchable in your Drive.
To do this, open the Drive app on your phone, open its menu, and tap Add New. Tap the Scan option in the list to scan and upload a document. Note that you could also add the Drive widget to your home screen and tap the camera icon on it to quickly open the Scan interface — this is useful if you frequently want to scan documents.

You’ll now see the scanner interface. Point your camera at a document and tap the button to scan it into Google Drive.

The great thing about this sort of app is that it’s not just a photo — Drive will extract the document part from the rest of the photo so it can be saved separately as a PDF file. You’re free to rotate and crop the document before saving it to your Drive.

Evernote

If you already depend on Evernote to organize your brain, you’ll be happy to hear that Evernote has this feature integrated. It can snap a scan of a document with your phone and save it as a PDF to your Evernote account, where you can access it from anywhere. Evernote’s OCR features will allow you to search through such scanned documents.
From within a note, tap the plus-sign button and select Page Camera.

Just center a page in the frame and tap the button to scan it. The nice thing about Evernote’s interface is that it makes it easy to scan multiple documents and attach them to a single note without ever leaving the scanner interface, while Drive is focused on saving each document as a PDF file with a separate save process.






Courtesy HTG

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