Online OCR

OCR Web Service has a trial license period of 30 days. You can upload scans or other image-based text, and receive the content in a number of different formats, including ascii text.

Testing provided excellent results.

Here is a PDF showing a test. The second page shows the GIF of the original used in the process. Here is the Indesign package, including the GIF file of the document. Some errors occurred, revealing the danger of using OCR. At the same time, you could have made these same errors typing in the text.

The absolutely best OCR I have ever seen resides in Acrobat Professional. If you have Acrobat, don't even fool with any of this other stuff.

See also:

• ABBYY FineReader. Not as good as OnlineOCR. See here.
• OCR Terminal, untested.
• Free-OCR. The return text had extra linefeeds where the text wrapped. I had to run the copy through eCleaner to get rid of them. If you're unlucky enough to find yourself on a Mac, you can achieve the same result in Indesign by doing a find-and-replace: ^p^p replaced by ^p.
• Cometdocs, free online document converter. This free service includes an OCR function.
• OCROnline.
• Free Online OCR: performed well testing a jpg of a page at 300ppi.
  

The Bank Card Tutorial For GDP 111

Click to see the video.

You should never, under any circumstances, distort text. Ever. Except sometimes. Look. This is the real world. Suppose that you must imitate a piece that your boss has stolen away from another house by undercutting its price. This other house, located high on a pedestal, would never distort type. Instead, they would fork out the $35 to $75 to purchase the face, and eat the cost. Your boss, on the other hand just says, make it work. Don't even think of asking him to purchase the face. So there you have it it. By the way, another trick that you should never use in a case like this is to give the bold face a thin white outline centered on the edge. This will knock the weight back a smidge toward the semibold that is called for in the spec. Be careful doing this. Some fonts work better than others. You may have to take the text into illustrator, create outlines, and then work on it there. Obviously this method would not be suitable for body text.

All of this is visual, so use your judgment. That's what judgment is for, and why you have it.

Resources:

• The PDF
• The Package

Further reading:

• Setting Indents in CS4, on the Adobe site.
• Creating a Reverse Indent, by James Fritz, on Indesign Secrets.