SwiftScan's Text Recognition Feature
How does SwiftScan Text Recognition (OCR) work?
First off, here is some basic information about our OCR technology:
OCR stands for optical character recognition. Our cutting-edge OCR technology recognizes and extracts the text from your scanned documents.
Here is some basic info about our OCR engine:
- OCR is only performed locally on your device, i.e., we don't and won't send anything outside to an unknown server
- Currently, SwiftScan supports OCR for over 60 different languages.
- We've combined several technologies for the OCR engine.
So how does it work?
It's a pre-requisite to have a SwiftScan pro for you to use OCR. If you have SwiftScan Pro, your settings will offer additional Pro features.
Tap on Text Recognition (OCR) to enter the configuration. The top row defines whether Text Recognition is enabled or not. It also includes the list of supported OCR languages. Ensure that the language (s) you need are enabled, but please note that the OCR result is better when you select fewer languages.
Once OCR is activated, OCR will be applied to each scan. The first time you scan a document, a short message will appear, Waiting for OCR files... During this time, SwiftScan is initializing OCR. This may take a little longer; SwiftScan needs to download essential support files to your language selection.
Next, you will see the message Processing Pages... In this step, OCR is applied to your scan. Depending on the scan quality and the content, this may take (in rare cases) 2-3 minutes, but usually only 30-40 seconds. The progress is indicated in percent.
Now OCR is done. To access the contents, tap the scan in the list view, which brings you to the document view.
Tap Text at the top (just below the file name). The extracted text will now be shown separately and can be shared and searched.
If the document contains text such as phone numbers, emails, or addresses, you can use them with one tap in the Actions Menu.
Moreover, as soon as OCR is applied to a PDF scan, all contents are searchable by using Spotlight Search and the Scan Pro App search.
A few more tips
To ensure the best OCR results, please consider the following:
- The better the document quality, the better the scan and the OCR result.
- Make sure that your scan gets enough light.
- Ensure that the languages are correctly configured in the OCR configurator.
- Please also ensure that the image orientation is in portrait mode, not landscape mode. Currently, our OCR engine can only work with portrait scans.
Manual OCR
Still, have some old documents lying around that have not been OCR'd yet?
Here's how you can apply the text recognition manually:
- Open the document
- Tap Text at the top
- Tap Re-Run OCR below the message that no text was found