Orangeinks

OCR Terminal: Convert Scanned images into Searchable Text

OCR Terminal is an online OCR service that allows you to convert PDF documents to Word, JPEG images to Word and scanned images into documents that you can edit.

What is OCR?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recoginition. It is the mechanical or electronic translation of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-editable text. The translated materials are often acquired by using a scanner and translated by an OCR software or machine.O

You can use OCR Terminal to convert scanned documents, photographed documents, faxes, multi-page PDFs and TIFFs into editable documents. OCR Terminal also accurately preserves the formatting and page layout so that tables, images, captions and headers are accurately replicated in the processed files.

The service gives you 20 free page conversions per month. If you need the service for more images to text conversion jobs, you can easily pay for more pages. This will save you a lot of time in producing editable digital copies of printed materials. Just scan your printed page and let OCR Terminal do the rest. You won’t have to worry about spending too much time in reproducing a similar digital copy of your printed document.

You can also request a desktop client by contacting the OCR Terminal Team.

Tags: Convert Images to Text, OCR, OCR Terminal, Scanned Images to Text

Photoshop: Smoke Manipulation Technique

In this Photoshop video tutorial, you’ll learn how to manipulate smoke in order to create a realistic image. You’ll learn to apply the Warp Tool and few other tricks to make smoke look like a skull. This technique has a variety of outcomes and works well with water, clouds and a whole bunch of other stuff.

* This is for intermediate users but also recommended for beginners in order to appreciate the power of Photoshop.

Tags: Manipulate Smoke, Photoshop, Skull Smoke, Smoke Effect

44Tips: Bookmarking the Popular Web

44Tips is a site where you can find popular web services on the internet. It also doubles as a visual bookmarking site. You can also import your Delicious bookmarks to your 44Tips account making it your home page for bookmarked services of your choice and the most popular ones available online.

The service uses the APIs of different services such as YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, DePers, Last.Fm and Thumbshots to bring you a unique and user-friendly web experience. Searching the site for images, music, photos, online radio stations, games and videos is as easy as clicking the appropriate category and performing your search. Adding them to your favorites or finding similar items can easily be done by clicking the “save” or “similar” button. All saved items will be imported by the site and stored in your Favorites folder.

What I like about the site is that you don’t have to leave 44Tips in order to view the bookmarked photos, videos, music and games. They are automatically imported to your 44Tips account and can be accessed from the site without changing location. If you are looking for a one-stop site for the most popular, if not the best, web services with an easy bookmarking and recommendation feature, check out 44Tips.

Tags: 44Tips, bookmarking site, Popular Bookmarks, Popular Sites, Popular Web

Shape Collage: Fast Shape Picture Collage Creator

Shape Collage is a light-weight desktop application that allows you create photo collages automatically. The selling point of the software is that you can do them in any shape you can think of. It works on Windows (XP, Vista, 2000), Mac OS X and Linux. Java must be installed in order for Shape Collage to run.

Creating your shaped collage is automatic and only takes a minute of your time to create and a couple more to setup. The photos are automatically arranged depending on the shape of your choice. You can use a rectangular, circular or heart shape for starters. If you want to me more creative with your collage, you can use the text option. Shape Collage will follow the outline of the letters in your text using the provided photos. And if you want to be extremely creative, you can customize and draw your own shape, adjust some settings and watch the collage engine do the rest for you.

Shape Collage is a quick, fun and creative way of producing photo collages. You can use it to create something new for your friends or use it on your next design. Just play around with the settings until you get your desired effect.

Shape Collage is completely free for personal use, but for commercial use, Shape Collage Pro must be purchased (1 license per computer).

Tags: Collage, Collage Creator, Create Shapes, Photo Collage, Shape Collage

FFSummary: Summarizes your FriendFeed Feeds

Are you a FriendFeed user but having trouble keeping up with your friend’s feeds? FFSummary will send you a summary consisting of the most popular posts in your feed. The summary will be sent to your email on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This way you won’t have to worry about missing popular trends found on your FriendFeed.

To use the free service, simply grant it access to your FriendFeed account and hand them your email address. The next step is to create a new notification. Just select from daily, weekly or monthly summary and place the number of entries you want to be emailed to you (you can select up to 30 entries). You can also select multiple types of summaries. If you want feed summaries to be delivered to you on a daily and monthly basis, all you have to do is add another notification.

This is a great way of tracking friend feeds if you don’t have time to check your FriendFeed account all the time. With FFSummary, you can schedule your updates and get only the most popular ones. You won’t have to miss popular trends due to massive updates made by your FriendFeed buddies.

Tags: FFSummaries, friendfeed, Notification, Summarize Feeds

MyMemory: Combines Machine Translation with Human Translation

MyMemory is an online translator that utilizes the power of machine and human translators. It gives you quick access to a large number of translations originating from professional translators, LSPs, customers and multilingual web content. It uses a powerful matching algorithm to provide the best translations available for your source text. MyMemory currently contains 157.832.530 professionally translated segments.

It differs from traditional technologies in terms of the project’s ambitious scale, and its centralized, collaborative architecture. Anyone may consult or contribute to MyMemory via the internet, although contributions are carefully vetted for quality.

To enhance the archive, MyMemory crawls the web for bilingual documents, evaluates their quality, classifies them by subject and aligns them. MyMemory can also extract terminology and sentences automatically from bilingual web pages suggested by users for quick indexing.

If you are not satisfied with Google Translator and other translation sites, give MyMemory a try and gain access to the millions of translated date segments.

Tags: Human Translator, Machine Transltor, My Memory, Translated, translator