Leadtools OCR tools. Offline OCR scanning for iOS.

OCR is a handy tool to have in the reviewers arsenal. Leadtools OCR tools is a handy way to grab text from an image, screen cap or anything so you don’t have to re type what’s already been typed. A valuable timesaver in so many way but only if it works (hence this review). Similar ocr app use online recognition processing, sending the image off and then emailing results. Lead tools does it all offline, prompting me to download an app with no App Store reviews.

In this case I was just about to sit down and copy features and product specifications from a manual as they weren’t on the Internet and always looking for an easier solution I decided I’d rather edit text than type pages off it.

With lead tools OCR The premise is simple, take a photo ands other hit recognise to grab the whole shebang or select an area. As always the better the picture the better the result.

In my testing I was scanning a manual and basically as long as it was straight enough and focus was right the accuracy rate really couldn’t be faulted. Before that i threw a screen grab at it as a way of getting to grips with the interface.

You can either scan the whole document or just a small defined area. The standard foray of image adjustments like rotate, zoom etc are present as you’d expect them to be.

Flying through the app is easy as icons are recognisable but the color doesn’t change on a press. It took me a fair while to work out I’d pressed select and it was working.

Selecting isn’t an obvious process either as you have to click and hold to draw the area you want recognising. Releasing your finger starts the OCR process. For the first few goes nothing was coming up and it was purely by chance I saw the familiar walking ants selection box.

Recognising text is brisk even with text laden images but the process does slow as you’d expect with less than perfect images.

Upsides.

• It’s fast.
• Copes well will angles and less than perfect lighting.
• High accuracy rate.

Downsides.

• Buttons down the bottoms part of the screen don’t show as highlighted.
• Selecting text doesn’t let you resize a selection area leading to a lot of miss selections.
• No table or tablature support

It would be nice if…

It supported the iPhones rotation feature so I could take pictures in portrait and have the whole ui to accommodate that instead of taking a picture, rotating, selecting text etc, etc.