Journal articles are just as relevant in the academic world today as they’ve ever been, but fewer and fewer people actually handle a physical journal on a day-to-day basis. Instead students and professors are amassing ever-growing folders of PDF files containing the papers they need to do their job. These files are convenient in many ways but the more papers you collect the harder it is to find anything.

Featuring quality OCR and a searchable document library complete with metadata (author, subjects, tags and more), Qiqqa makes organizing your PDF files a snap. Add an indexed way to add comments and markup pages and you’ll quickly realize that this is the tool you’ve been looking for.

Your Library

Start up Qiqqa and you’ll see a summary of your library, along with a collection of links to learn how to better use Qiqqa:

You’ll also notice that there is a tabbed interface. This means you can open various documents at once, which is useful while writing.

Open the library and you’ll see your PDF collection:

All of your papers are presented here, assuming you’ve added them. Adding files to this library is easy. You can set Qiqqa to watch a folder on your computer for new files; do this and any files added to that folder will be in your library. Alternatively, you can add files individually or add entire folders of files.

Once you build your collection you can scroll through to find a specific paper if you’d like. Alternatively, you can use the search function:

This is probably the quickest way to find what you’re looking for, but it is by no means the only way. You can also break your library down using metadata:

Above you can see the papers organized according to whether or not they’ve been read. As you can see there are a variety of other options, including authors, publications, year and tags. Some PDFs include this information but most don’t; you’ll have to add metadata to the files to use these tools.

Getting Metadata

Luckily Qiqqa also includes a brilliant way of collecting metadata. It requires some input from you, but will ultimately save you a lot of time when you’re searching for documents and when you’re building a bibliography later. This video tutorial outlines everything nicely:

Reading PDF Files

Qiqqa comes with a built-in PDF reader, of course:

From here you can read the way you usually would, with a few bonuses. You can highlight text and add notes; these notes are then indexed for easy reference. In fact, all text in all the PDFs you add to Qiqqa are indexed; even PDFs made from scanned documents. This is possible because Qiqqa comes with very good OCR technology.

This is put to good use. For example, Qiqqa can automatically determine the title of a paper by looking for the biggest words on the front page of the paper. This same concept is used to automatically generate a table of contents for any file that doesn’t have one, a feature that can save you a lot of time.

Other Features

If you’re working on a paper you might want to visualize your ideas alongside the sources that inspired them. Qiqqa includes a tool for this:

This isn’t that different from other mind mapping software, except that you can directly reference the papers from which you’re drawing ideas.

Another feature worth mentioning is online syncing. You need to purchase a user account to really make use of this, but for academics with multiple computers it could be a godsend. It’s even possible to browse your papers online.

Download Qiqqa

Ready to download Qiqqa? Visit the Qiqqa homepage to find out how.

Want to see Qiqqa in action before you download anything? Watch the following video; it goes over all the features mentioned above and more:

You can find more Qiqqa tutorial videos here.

Conclusion

I’m not an academic; at least, not anymore. My wife Kathy is though, and it was her quest to organize papers that made me aware of Qiqqa. She is a physics graduate student and uses the software all the time; she tells me it’s extremely useful and I can certainly see why.

I want to know what you think, though. Is Qiqqa a good way to manage documents, or is there a better one? Let me know in the comments below, as always. I love learning from you guys.

For all the small business owners, and indeed the tech geeks who just love new apps to play around with; here are three great online office apps that will help you reduce all of that paperwork.

Online OCR

This tool will take care of a lot of boring transcription that we all have to do now and again. I often find myself transcribing accounts and business plans into a text editor when I really should be using this tool.

To put it bluntly, it takes a scanned image of a document or a PDF file and transforms it into an editable text document such as MS Word or MS Notepad (*.txt file). This service is free ““ to an extent. There is no registration required and you can convert five pages every hour as an unregistered user which is plenty for small business owners. For registered users, the first five pages are free but after that every page costs 10 cents. I’d imagine this is only for large businesses who would be scanning documents with hundreds of pages in a short period of time.

We have previously covered other OCR applications such as Varun’s review of JOCR and Saikat’s Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools.

Fill Any PDF

Many of us will have to fill in several forms when tax returns are due, insurance policies are required or indeed for business procedures. It’s common practice to receive those forms in PDF format either by e-mail or by downloading them and then printing them out to fill in by hand.

FillAnyPDF is an extremely easy-to-use online PDF form editor that allows you to fill in a PDF form using a text editor or freehand writing. What’s more, you can also create your own PDF forms and share them online with other people and request they fill them in using this editor.

Obviously security is a big issue when dealing with confidential forms online so FillAnyPDF gives you the option to ‘whiteout’ certain areas and only make those areas visible to the person the form is intended for. The last thing you need is somebody having access to your social security number and personal details.

We have discussed in the past various other options.   Ones that immediately spring to mind are Karl’s review of PDFVue and Jackson’s review of FormulatePro which is a Mac option.

WatchDox

As we touched on above, security is paramount concerning business documents. But you can’t exactly put a PDF in a briefcase and handcuff it to yourself. It’s impractical and sort of weird. Plus I’m sure every thief that sees you will definitely want that briefcase.

Anyway, this is a method of sharing pretty much any document online, in a secure environment with the intended recipients.

Here is how it works:

1. You upload the document, enter the recipients e-mail address and set the security measures on the document such as an expiration or curtain.
2. You add instructions for the recipient concerning the document (optional).
3. Then the recipient gets an e-mail with a link to the document.
4. They can view the document with registration or downloading anything.
5. He or she cannot copy or download the document without your direct permission.
6. Once the expiry date comes the document is destroyed and is no longer viewable online.

I think this is actually one of the best ways of sharing documents in business these days because, as governments and banks around the globe have shown us, CDs, e-mails and hard copy documents have a habit of going missing along with tonnes of valuable information.

Hopefully these three tools will make your office life flow a little smoother.  Which office apps do you use regularly?

Image Credit : foundphotoslj

How do you convert that PDF to text? You could print it and try and scan it back into your machine using a free OCR software or you could grab this awesome little application called PDF Text Extractor.

We have covered several applications for retrieving data from the confines of a PDF document but this application concentrates on the text. If that is what you need ““ your text and nothing but the text – then this is the program for you.

Let’s take a look at it and how it can convert a PDF to text.

I started by downloading and installing the program. It was a quick process and the MSI installer file was about 1.13 megabytes. When I ran the application this is what I saw:

This is a really easy layout and graphical user interface ““ simply select the PDF you would like to convert to plain text. Then you select the folder you want the converted plain text file written to. You can type in a full path for each or hit the button next to the blank field to browse.

When you are ready your window will look something like this:

Now our PDF document that contained our text ““ the text that we need to reformat and put into a manual is in a file. That file looks like this before we begin:

7 full pages of text, text and more text. That would be a lot of typing for poor Betty our departments secretary. So I went Googling and found our little application. I fired it up and hit that magic convert button. Literally it took 2 seconds and then a window popped up that said it was complete:

I went looking in my d:\ drive for the file. I actually realized I had no idea what it was called or what the extension would be. I sorted the files by date created and found what i was looking for:

I opened the text file up and as you can see above the files name seems to always be TextFile.txt. The contents of the text file were just that”¦.all of the text that I needed! Yeah!

This is what I saw:

My formatting was not 100% there but all of the glorious text was and now it is a just a matter of copying, pasting and formatting. Nowhere near as big of a job as it was before! And we do not need Adobe Acrobat Reader, Writer or any other nonsense on our machine. Just this little application and a PDF file. You can open the text file in Word, Notepad++, Wordpad or whatever your favorite editor is.

How do you extract text from a PDF? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

Download: Text Extractor

Ah, modern technology is wonderful; take a scanned image (or take a snap using a mobile camera/Digicam) and presto ““ OCR software extracts all the information from the image into easily editable text format.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a system of converting scanned printed/handwritten image files into its machine readable text format. OCR software works by analyzing a document and comparing it with fonts stored in its database and/or by noting features typical to characters. Some OCR software also puts it through a spell checker to “guess” unrecognized words. 100% accuracy is difficult to achieve, but close approximation is what most software strive for.

Maybe you have already come across our previous How to Extract Text from Images (OCR) post and used JOCR, a a free OCR software tool. Or you might have set your preference for a few online OCR tools. Then again, if you have thought up ways to exploit OCR software for productivity shortcuts, then let us give you a few more tools to play with.

We will be looking at 5 free pieces of OCR software and to start off let’s see the overlooked two that are already installed on our systems.

OCR Using Microsoft OneNote 2007

For the occasional basic OCR stuff, MS OneNote’s optical character recognition feature is a timesaver. You might have missed it”¦it’s called Copy Text from Picture.

• Drag a scan or a saved picture into OneNote. You can also use OneNote to clip part of the screen or an image into OneNote.
• Right click on the inserted picture and select Copy Text from Picture. The copied optically recognized text goes into the clipboard and you can now paste it into any program like Word or Notepad.

OneNote is simplicity personified. But it’s not too great for handwritten characters or even fuzzy ones. But for a quick job, I am all for OneNote’s clip and paste.

OCR Using Microsoft Office Document Imaging

Another little used tool within the Microsoft family. It’s right there under Menu – Microsoft Office ““ Microsoft Office Tools – Microsoft Office Document Imaging.

Doing OCR using the document imaging tool is a bit limiting because it accepts only TIFF (or MDI) formats. But that’s not too much of a bother as any graphic application can be used to convert an image to TIFF. In the screenshot below, I have used MS Paint to convert a JPEG to a TIFF.

• Open the file in Microsoft Office Document Imaging – File ““ Open.
• Click the little eye icon – Recognize Text Using OCR.
• Click on MS Word Icon ““ Send Text to Word.
• A MS Word File opens with the editable converted text.
• Alternatively, you can also use MS Paint to select a specific area and copy it to the clipboard. Open MS Office Document Imaging ““ select Page ““ Paste Page to copy the selection for OCR.

Again, MODI handled printed text ably, but my handwritten text was met with an “˜OCR performed but could not recognize text prompt’. Of course, do try out with your own handwriting.

So, now let’s leave the Microsoft family behind and look at three free tools which call themselves OCR Software”¦

SimpleOCR

The difficulty I was having with handwriting recognition using MS tools, could have found a solution in SimpleOCR. But the software offers handwriting recognition only as a 14 day free trial. Machine print recognition though does not have any restrictions.

• The software can be set up to read directly from a scanner or by adding a page (jpg, tiff, bmp formats).
• SimpleOCR offers some control over the conversion through text selection, image selection and text ignore features.
• Conversion to text takes the process into a validation stage; a user can correct discrepancies in the converted text using an in-built spell-checker.
• The converted file can be saved to a doc or txt format.

SimpleOCR was fine with normal text, but its handling of multi-column layouts was a comedown. In my opinion, the conversion accuracy of the Microsoft tools was considerably better than SimpleOCR.

SimpleOCR (v3.1) is a 9MB download and is compatible with Windows.

TopOCR

Just what I was talking about in the beginning!  TopOCR,  in a breakaway from typical OCR software, is designed more for digital cameras (at least 3MP) and mobile phones along with scanners. Like SimpleOCR, it has a two window interface ““ The source Image window and the Text window.

The image sourced from a camera or a scanner in the left window gets converted to the text format in the text editor on the right. The text editor functions like WordPad and can use Microsoft’s Text to Speech engine.

• The software supports JPEG, TIFF, GIF and BMP formats.
• Image settings like brightness, color, contrast, despeckle, sharpen etc. can be used to improve readability of the image.
• Camera filter settings can also be configured for enhancing the image.
• The converted file can be saved in a variety of formats ““ PDF, RTF, HTML and TXT.
• TopOCR functions well with straight oriented text but the usual failing of OCR with columned text remains.
• The software though, parses a mixed page (text plus graphics) well and processes the text only.
• The software works with 11 languages.

For best results with your camera read there How to Get the Best Results with TopOCR page.

TopOCR (v3.1) is an 8MB download and is compatible with Windows (not tested on Vista).

FreeOCR

This free OCR software uses the Tesseract OCR engine. Tesseract OCR code was developed at HP Labs between 1985 and 1995 and is currently with Google. It is thought of as one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available.

FreeOCR is a simple Windows interface for that underlying code.

• It supports most image files and multi-page TIFF files.
• It can handle PDF formats and is also compatible with TWAIN devices like scanners.
• FreeOCR also has the familiar double window interface with easy to understand settings.
• Before starting the one click conversion process, you can adjust the image contrast for better readability.

FreeOCR (v.2.03) requires Microsoft Net 2.0 framework. The Windows XP/Vista compatible 4.38MB software can also be downloaded from this alternate site.

Free OCR tools come with their own limitations. And scanning a page has to do a lot with resolutions, contrasts and clarity of fonts. From an average user’s standpoint, 100% OCR accuracy remains a pipedream.

Though the free tools were adequate with printed text, they failed with normal cursive handwritten text. My personal preference for offhand OCR use leans towards the two Microsoft products I mentioned in the beginning.

Your own say matters. Which is your tool of choice? Do the free OCR software recognize what you through at it? And more importantly, do you recognize what they throw back at you? Let us know”¦

Image Credit: kalleboo

A pretty straight forward and no fuss application. It does one thing and does it well. Download the application and install. Fire it up and you will be greeted by the main interface.

JOCR essentially allows you to take screenshots and then detect the text within the image, excellent for situations where you are copying from an image but you don’t want to type the text.

You can capture a region, a window or the entire desktop and then perform character recognition. Once you have captured the image just hit recognize and JOCR will attempt to give you the text from within the image.

It is pretty fast and the actual recognition time will depend upon the type of image you are trying to perform OCR on. The recognized text is placed on the clipboard and JOCR will open up a notepad file where you can paste the text and see how well JOCR fared. As you can see it did fairly well (just messing up Windows to IWindows in line 3)

Although JOCR is officially limited to reading screen grabs, however there is nothing stopping you from scanning a document, save it, open it up at 100 % and summon JOCR. It actually did a pretty good job when I opened this image and then took a screenshot of the window to read it.

JOCR requires that you have Microsoft Document Imaging installed on your system. If you have Office 2003 or higher, chances are that you have it installed. In case it is not, you can do so from within “Add and Remove Programs” and then choosing to install “Document Imaging”.

JOCR can recognize text in a number of languages ranging from Dutch to Hungarian to German to Russian. You would have to choose the language manually depending upon the type of characters you are going to be recognizing.

Although the application has not seen updates since some 2 years, it does a pretty good job on both black and white as well as colored images and could be a time saver with your scanned documents or images.

Have you ever used an OCR application? Which ones do you know about?