Doxie Go Meets OCR

Doxie Import If you have read my Doxie Go review, you will know that I like the scanner but I felt the lack of OCR capability (the ability to make a PDF searchable) was a bit of a stumbling block.

I’m happy to report that with the Doxie 2.1 software update, the software now has OCR built-in.

How Does It Work?

When you plug in your Doxie Go and import your images, the process is the same as outlined in my reviews.

However, when you hit the Save button, you now have a two new options: Save As PDF w/ OCR (B&W) and Save As PDF w/ OCR (Color)

Doxie Save OCR

As you might expect, when you choose one of those options, the Doxie software saves the PDF but applies OCR when it does so.

How Are The Results?

I have only had time to do very limited testing, but so far the results are pretty great.

Here is a sample PDF that I just scanned with the Doxie Go (click the image to download if you want):

Here is the OCR’d text. Not bad at all.

So far, if you are a Doxie Go user, the 2.1 looks to be a great addition. If you’ve tried out the OCR, let me know how it looks for you.

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About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 8 comments

joel - April 14, 2016 Reply

agent ransack is a free (i think) program that is perfect for searching text within an entire folder of pdf files. just point it to the folder and enter the text you want and boom… it goes through all the pdf’s and finds your text. hope that helps.

Karen - March 20, 2015 Reply

This is an old blog post so you may not reply (quite understandably). First, I’ll tell you I’ve really learned a lot from your site and blog posts (and podcast appearances) and I’m excited to get started on my long-delayed paperless lifestyle.

My question is about OCR — I’m going to use Evernote to catalog/organize most of my virtual files, but that already has OCR built in, too. So is it just a safety net to have a scanner AND Evernote OCR, or is OCR really unnecessary on the scanner, or do they in any way compete with each other?

Brooks Duncan - March 31, 2015 Reply

There are some things to know about using Evernote’s OCR. I personally do not use it for “important” documents that I want to keep long term.

-The searchable text is stored on Evernote’s servers and not in the PDF itself. This means that if you export that PDF out of Evernote, it will no longer be searchable.

-Evernote performs OCR server-side. This means if you store documents in a Local Notebook (because you don’t want them to be uploaded to Evernote), the text will not be made searchable.

-Evernote has some opaque rules around which PDFs it will OCR and which it won’t. For example, the PDF has to be less than 100 pages long and can not be larger than 25MB.

For me, I prefer to let my scanner or OCR software on my computer make the PDF searchable and then upload it to Evernote. It’s 100% up to you though.

Karen - May 27, 2015 Reply

This info was SUPER helpful. Thank you!

Javier - April 18, 2012 Reply

Hello there, thanks a lot for your reviews, they're very informative. I'm contemplating the idea of buying a Doxie. Do you have any opinion on how it would handle receipts? More specifically, I'd like to know if the OCR software provides any basic capability for organizing the scanned receipts, so that I can store them in a categorized manner.

Any ideas/suggestions/pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Caroline - January 19, 2012 Reply

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but how do you access that OCR'd text? Right now I just drag all my PDFs into Evernote where I can obviously search for a word (I have premium) but the idea of converting to text is appealing for some documents.

Brooks Duncan - January 19, 2012 Reply

Not a stupid question at all. There are a bunch of tools to do that, but the way I do it is pretty low-tech. I open up the searchable PDF in Preview (or on Windows, Acrobat Reader), go Edit > Select All (or select the part I want), then Copy, then paste into a text editor.