Hi all,

I have been looking around to find a solution this problem:

I have a PDF file that has scans of pages from a book (in other words the pdf contains images with words)

now is my question is there a way to read/extract the from the images? with OCR or something?

Are there companents for this or software?

Thanks a lot,

Mike

Pegasus (http://www.pegasusimaging.com/) has stuff for OCR.  Many other companies do, too.  Licensing for some, including Pegasus, are quite expensive for small operations. 

Just do a search for .NET OCR component.

Why not go with a really good open source OCR for .NET...

Tesseract OCR: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ (forum is very useful)

.NET DLL here: http://www.pixel-technology.com/freeware/tessnet2/

We've used it for extracting text from Tiff, but I am sure it also works with PDF files. It is one of the best OCR I've found. I've tried Pegasus one which only gave us 30% accuracy, but Tessnet2 gave us around 70-80% accuracy for old documents.

I hate open source licenses =/.   Too wordy; either say I can reuse it and make money or I can't.

I've never used Pegasus, I've just seen it in places and knew it was available.  Mostly, I just wanted to give the asker a term to search for.

 I found that acrobat ocr the tiff files perfectly.

ps2goat:

I hate open source licenses =/.   Too wordy; either say I can reuse it and make money or I can't.

Me too.

However, if one reads them even a little, then it is quick to see if it is good or not.

For example, the Apache license, now used for Tesseract, is, IMHO, very good.

Others, FSF for example, are very bad "must release your project to open source domain", last I checked. Not good at all.

That said-- I agree with you-- make it free or not, period.

Thank you for bringing it up.

Thank you.

-- Mark Kamoski

FWIW, as of now... IMHO...

GNU Lesser GPL = good

GNU GPL = bad

As noted here...

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

The GNU Project has two principal licenses to use for libraries. One is the GNU Lesser GPL; the other is the ordinary GNU GPL. The choice of license makes a big difference: using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs.

...so that's just part of the puzzle, I think.

HTH.

Thank you.

-- Mark Kamoski

Hi...

now is my question is there a way to read/extract the from the images?

If you are going to extract text from that scanned image you can use Tessnet2.

its a open source API.

http://www.pixel-technology.com/freeware/tessnet2/