Posts tagged OCR
PDFPen Scan Plus: A Great Tool for Ministers

Have you ever been reading a document, book, or handout and said to yourself, "Man, this is some great content. I really want to use it in my next class/sermon/talk, so I guess I'll just have to type it all out into my notes"?  

I have, many times. As preachers and teachers, we are always taking content from commentaries, papers, and other sermons - and if it's not on the internet already or in a Bible program where you can copy and paste, you have to manually type that content out into whatever notes you have, and that can take valuable time away from your study and preparation. 

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Enter PDFPen Scan +. This is an app for iOS that enables you to take a picture of any document, book, or text on any page and convert it to text that you can edit, copy, or paste anywhere you want. And it's great at it too.  

PDFPen Scan + uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to pull the text out of a PDF. You make a PDF out of the document by simply taking a picture of it with your iDevice. You crop the page to fit, then the document is stored in iCloud and synced to all devices running PDFPen Scan +. Then you can choose to OCR that document - literally pulling the text off the page - and share it via email, text, Dropbox, and many other options. 

I find PDFPen Scan + to be especially helpful with old documents that I have on paper but don't have an actual file of that document. It has really come in handy.  

Unfortunately, there's no trial version available since Apple doesn't do that, but you can PDFPen Scan + for $4.99 in the App Store. That's a small penance to pay for the power of this app.  

Check out the video by David Sparks as well. It gives you a real sense of what this app can do.