ORPALIS PDF OCR

Give this application a document and it will use optical character recognition (OCR) on it to generate a searchable PDF. So if you have an unsearchable document, like a scanned image for example, you can use ORPALIS PDF OCR to turn it into a searchable PDF document.

ORPALIS PDF OCR is compatible with any Windows edition starting from Windows XP SP3 onward. A straightforward setup wizard will guide you through all the steps you need to take to install ORPALIS PDF OCR on a Windows-powered computer.

Since this application was developed by a company that’s based in France, it comes as no surprise that the interface provides support for English as well as French. As you can see from the screenshots and from the Quick Look video that accompanies this article, the interface is very simple and quite easy to figure out.

Three ORPALIS PDF OCR editions are available: Free, Professional Desktop, and Professional Server. ORPALIS PDF OCR Free Edition comes with multiple limitations, chief among them being that it can only convert PDF documents (the paid versions can convert 100+ file formats) and that OCR works with just 5 languages (the paid versions can handle 60+ languages). To get rid of these limitations you’ll have to buy one of the Pro editions, which at the time of writing this are discounted by 50%, priced at $99 for the Desktop Edition and $499 for the Server edition.

There’s one more thing that you need to know about ORPALIS PDF OCR Free Edition: it brings up a nag and wait screen at startup. Every time you launch this application you’ll be forced to wait and stare at a nag screen. All so that you could convert a non-searchable PDF to a searchable PDF.

ORPALIS PDF OCR can prove to be a great tool if you need to convert non-searchable documents into searchable PDFs. But only if you pay to get the Pro version, because the Free one can only convert PDFs.