pdfMachine Pro: Flexible OCR Engine Support
pdfMachine Pro enhances your document processing workflow by offering flexibility with two distinct Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines. This allows you to choose the best option based on your specific needs for accuracy, features, cost, and connectivity.
1. Built-in Tesseract Engine
Built-in Included Cost Offline Capable
- Availability: The well-regarded open-source Tesseract engine is included directly within pdfMachine Pro.
- Cost: Use of the Tesseract engine is covered by your standard pdfMachine Pro license – there are no extra per-page or usage fees.
- Usage: Ideal for standard OCR tasks. Since it runs locally on your computer, it works perfectly even when you are offline.
- Best For: General-purpose text recognition on clear documents, offline processing, and cost-sensitive workflows.
2. Advanced OCR - Microsoft Document Intelligence Engine
Advanced AI Usage Fee Applies Online Required
- Availability: Integrates Microsoft's powerful, cloud-based AI service for state-of-the-art OCR.
- Cost: This is a premium service provided by Broadgun Software and Microsoft. Using it incurs per page usage fee.
- Usage: Requires an active internet connection to send data to and receive results from Microsoft's servers.
- Best For: Achieving maximum accuracy, processing complex layouts (tables, forms), handling challenging fonts or low-quality scans and handwritten documents.
- Rapid Improvement: Benefit from continuous AI improvements.
The Choice is Yours!
pdfMachine Pro empowers you to select the engine that best fits the task at hand. You can typically switch between Tesseract and Microsoft Document Intelligence within the software's settings or when initiating an OCR process.
Consider using the built-in Tesseract for everyday tasks and leveraging the power (and associated usage fee) of Microsoft Document Intelligence for your most demanding OCR challenges.