Upload Your Files to Google Drive for OCR With your PDF or scanned image ready in the proper format, now let's look at how to get your files uploaded for OCR with Google Drive. More about Evernote, review the tutorial:Īfter taking your scan and transforming it into a clean PDF, your result should look something like this to start with:Ī PDF file as viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Several apps that allows you to scan documents with your smart phone.

There are a number of apps in the App Store that “scan” physical documents into clean PDFs using a phone’s camera.įor example, Evernote's Scannable is just one of

If you don’t have a scanner, your phone can be used in place of one.

If you own a scanner, you can use programs like Doxie or other scanner software to digitize them for upload into Google Drive.

If your files are on your computer, make sure that their file format is one of those supported by Google Drive. If the document or photo you want to use is physical, then scan them onto the computer. While Google Drive supports OCR for many different languages, OCR on languages that use non-Latin character sets may be buggy and may not produce desirable results. If you have a document that's rather unreadable, you can still attempt to OCR it, but the results likely won't be that nice. Standard typefaces, such as Helvetica and Times New Roman, will produce better results than more obscure typefaces. Stay away from overly stylized fonts or text effects.Īdditionally, make sure that the text being scanned is horizontal and reads from left to right. For best results, use a standard font like Helvetica. Make sure your file is high resolution with clear contrasts and even lighting-these are by far the most important factors in ensuring a successful conversion. There are a few rules of thumb to produce optimal results from OCR in Google Drive. Pro Tip: If you want to convert multiple pages to text, PDF format is the most efficient as all pages can be uploaded in one batch.

The first step and most important step in OCR is finding the PDFs or pictures that you want to convert to text files. In this tutorial, we'll look at what is Google Drive's OCR process and simple steps to begin working with it. I'll show you how to use Google Drive to quickly convert your scanned images and PDF documents into editable text files online. It includes a little-known free OCR tool that is a powerful, easy to use image to text converter. Now if you don't have a copy of Acrobat or Word, there's an even better option: Google Drive.

Ocr font like