Google Docs OCR horrorshow: how do these guys manage books?
- Wednesday, 23 June 2010 08:00
After offering it as an experimental service, Google has now formally added optical character recognition capabilities and PDF import to its online Docs service.
The tools couldn't be simpler to use—a simple check box in the document import dialog—and Google would seem to be ideally positioned when it comes to OCR technology, which it uses heavily for its book scanning efforts. Sadly, the end results are disappointing, with frequent errors in the OCR and little of the formatting brought in from PDFs.
