OCR on the Go

Perhaps you bought a portable scanner (see Portable Scanners) to take on business trips. That’s great—but you can’t always have your scanner with you. And even if you did, it wouldn’t help with documents that won’t fit in it—menus, posters, billboards, street signs, and so on. But all these and more are still fair game for capture and OCR. You just need a digital camera (which could be the one in your iPhone, iPad, or other mobile device) and an app to do the necessary processing. With the right mobile tools, you may find yourself scanning receipts and business cards on the spot.

Learn about Pocket-sized OCR Tools

Very likely you have a device in your pocket that includes a camera, a wireless network connection, and the capability of running third-party software. If so, you can do many of the same things you can do with a desktop or portable scanner and OCR software, and in fact you can do a few cool things more easily. For example:

These sorts of tools are great for travelers, especially those who spend time in places where they don’t read the local language well. But they’re useful for anyone who, from time to time, wants to create a searchable record of something they can’t put through a scanner.

I should mention that in many cases, apps that run on mobile devices don’t produce searchable PDFs as such. The data may be stored in some other format, or you may need to use a proprietary system for searching it. Even so, such apps offer enormous advantages.

Pick an iOS Scanning App

In my household, all the mobile data gadgets are made by Apple, so I’m most familiar with apps that run under iOS. And there are hundreds upon hundreds of iOS apps that offer mobile scanning features of one sort or another.

However, not all mobile scanning apps are created equal. For example, some create PDFs but don’t perform OCR to make them searchable; others do perform OCR but create only plain text files, not PDFs. Some work on both iPhones and iPads; others are iPhone-only. And some have special features that focus on business cards or receipts. So, be sure to read the fine print when considering which apps to buy.

Note: For capturing documents, especially at close range, you’ll get the best results with an iPhone 4, fifth-generation iPod touch, iPad 3, or newer models in any of these lines. These products’ sensors have a high resolution and reasonably good low-light performance; the iPhone is arguably the best choice in that it also has an LED “flash.”

Although I can’t begin to do justice to the huge range of iOS apps in this category, here are a few representative examples out of many hundreds, divided into broad groups.

Business Card Scanner Apps

Apps that let you snap a photo of a business card and extract the content to your Contacts app include:

Receipt Scanner Apps

If your main need is to scan receipts on the go—not necessarily to create searchable PDFs but to capture the data for expense reports and the like—try an app like one of these:

Document Scanner Apps

For replacing a portable scanner, perhaps the most important category is general-purpose scanning apps, which are designed for full-size pages but in some cases also have special support for business cards. All those listed here are universal (work on iPhone and iPad) and can create multi-page searchable PDFs as well as enhancing the images of scanned pages (for example, deskewing them and improving contrast):

Scanner-specific Apps

Several scanner manufacturers offer iOS apps that let you extend the scanner’s capabilities in various ways. For example:

Document Management Apps

In Use a Document Manager, I mentioned several desktop document managers that come in iOS versions such that you can sync searchable PDFs and other files between devices. In some cases, notably DEVONthink To Go, the capabilities extend to mobile scanning. (And Neat for iOS, mentioned in the previous list, also counts as a document manager.)

Use Other Smartphones

If you have a smartphone that runs another operating system, you still have numerous options. I was able to find quite a few scanning apps for the other three leading smartphone platforms—Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 8.

Android

Next to iOS, the greatest range of choices for mobile scanning exists on the Android platform. Just a smattering of the many options:

BlackBerry

The BlackBerry OCR apps I was able to find focus almost entirely on business cards and receipts:

There are also several apps that create PDFs from photos but do not include OCR, such as:

If you need OCR alone, try Scan to Text, which creates plain text files (not searchable PDFs).

Windows Phone

I found a number of OCR apps for Windows Phone, but of these, only OCR Demo claims to be able to export the results as PDF:

Use Your Digital Camera

If you don’t have a smartphone, or if its camera isn’t of sufficient quality for the results you want, you can snap a picture with any digital camera, upload it to your Mac, and run it through your favorite OCR software to produce a searchable PDF.

However, let me offer a few tips:

OCR for Students and Researchers

In college and graduate school I spent countless hours in libraries collecting books and journals, and then photocopying just the pages I needed and taking those with me for further study. Nowadays, I might snap a digital photo of the relevant pages instead, but there’s yet another option: the handheld scanner.

Several companies make wand- or pen-shaped scanners that you can swipe over the portion of a page you want to capture. Some of these store pages for later transfer to your Mac, PC, or iOS device; others connect with a USB cable to transfer images in real time. In any case, they’re much more compact than even the smallest portable document scanner, and you can use them with books and other bound items.

Because there’s no motorized feeder at all, these scanners are more prone than most to image distortion, but they’re still an excellent way to capture portions of materials you simply can’t take with you.

Examples of ultra-compact, feedless scanners:

And, for the ultimate in compactness, there’s PlanOn’s diminutive SlimScan SS100, which can fit in your wallet in place of the business cards you’ll no longer have to carry. Reviewers don’t seem to have very kind things to say about it, though; caveat emptor.