OCRTextReader

A lightweight Windows desktop application that extracts text from images, PDFs, and Office documents with ease.

Features

• Image Selection: Select images or documents (JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PDF, EXCEL, POWERPOINT (PPTX)
• OCR Processing: Extract text from images using Tesseract OCR engine
• Text Preview: View extracted text in the application
• Word Export: Export extracted text to Microsoft Word (.docx) format
• User-Friendly Interface: Clean and intuitive Windows Forms UI built using the ReaLTaiizor UI framework.

Download

Download Link

Prerequisites

1. .NET 4.8 SDK or later
2. Tesseract OCR installed on your system

Installing Tesseract OCR

Option 1: Using Installer (Recommended for Windows)

1. Download Tesseract OCR installer from: https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki
2. Run the installer and install to default location (usually C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR)
3. The installer includes English language data files by default

Option 2: Using Chocolatey

choco install tesseract

Option 3: Manual Installation

1. Download Tesseract binaries
2. Extract to a folder (e.g., C:\Tesseract-OCR)
3. Download language data files from: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata
4. Place eng.traineddata in the tessdata folder

Building the Application

1. Open a terminal in the project directory
2. Restore NuGet packages:

   dotnet restore

3. Build the project:

   dotnet build

4. Run the application:

   dotnet run

Usage

1. Launch the application
2. Click "Select Image/Document" to choose an image file
3. Click "Extract Text (OCR)" to process the image and extract text
4. Review the extracted text in the text box
5. Click "Export to Word Document" to save the text as a .docx file

Project Structure

OCRTextReaderApp/
├── MainForm.cs          # Main UI form
├── OCRService.cs        # OCR text extraction service
├── WordExportService.cs # Word document export service
├── Program.cs           # Application entry point
├── OCRTextReader.csproj # Project file

Dependencies

• Tesseract: OCR engine for text extraction
• DocumentFormat.OpenXml: For creating Word documents

Troubleshooting

"OCR processing failed" Error

• Ensure Tesseract OCR is installed
• Verify that eng.traineddata exists in the tessdata folder
• Check that the tessdata path is accessible

"No text could be extracted"

• The image quality might be too low
• Try using higher resolution images
• Ensure the image contains clear, readable text
• Check if the text is in a supported language (English by default)

Notes

• The application currently supports English text extraction by default
• To add support for other languages, download the corresponding language data files from the Tesseract tessdata repository
• PDF files may require additional processing depending on their format

Third-Party Libraries

This project uses the following open-source libraries:

• Tesseract OCR – Licensed under the Apache License 2.0
  https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

• DocumentFormat.OpenXml – Licensed under the MIT License
  https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK

• ReaLTaiizor – Licensed under the MIT License
  https://github.com/Taiizor/ReaLTaiizor

Screenshot

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