Show HN: Convert scanned documents into searchable PDFs

Is this based on an open-source OCR engine, a proprietary engine running on your own server(s), or a proprietary engine you're accessing as a service?

Very clean UI. But how can one judge the OCR quality of this service? The service presents me a converted PDF, but how good was the conversion?<p>Is this better than <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocr.space" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocr.space</a> ?<p>For my private documents I would always use offline OCR software like <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.a9t9.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;free-ocr-software.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.a9t9.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;free-ocr-software.html</a>

While interesting, and looks to be a needed services, the page leaves many questions, such as:<p>What&#x27;s the privacy model? While the PDFs are deleted, what happens to the searchable content? Is it also deleted?<p>What&#x27;s the revenue model? How can we be sure it&#x27;ll be around in a few months?<p>Is there an AJAX interface?<p>Is the quality or performance better than running Tesseract on a server?

I would use this service, if I had scanned PDFs where I didn&#x27;t care about confidentiality. As it stands, though, uploading them to an unknown web resource seems risky.<p>Thoughts?

I use PDFScanner on my Mac. Works great at scanning time or post-scanning. No, it&#x27;s not free but it&#x27;s worth it. Pay the $15, ya cheap bastiches! :-)<p>BTW, how is this news?

I&#x27;ve had this idea for a while, but as an iPhone app. The case where I could have used it the most was when I would be studying and looking through textbooks for a particular word or phrase. It would be so convenient to just take a picture, input the text to look for, and see a highlight. If this were a mobile app and I were still in college, I would most certainly buy it.

I just use the OCR function built in to Adobe Acrobat.<p>Don&#x27;t know it the OCR function is available in the reader version.

Been hanging here in Firefox now for about 5-10 minutes its a receipt for my insurance (no private info) about 2 pages in length.<p>Either way, super cool idea. My Dad will be stoked about this as he&#x27;s been OCR&#x27;ing his way into oblivion for the past few years.

Is this Web site accessible (say, via screen-reader)? Scanned PDFs can be a huge problem for people who are visually impaired.

Is this based on tesseract?