Condense App Reviews

This is with out doudt, one of those apps you say really, and once you have used it you say why it’s this built in to the system. It is an elegant and functional, solution to the problem of copying text from various sources. I have been using this for a long time and forgot to review it, shame on me, and well done to the developer. I often photograph something on the iphone and straight across to the Mac and run the app over the image, I use this for both German and English and have had no problems, all works well. Es ist ohen wörter die best utility für text Erkennung am Mac, von verschedener quelle, Super gemacht, Viel Erfolg

Best application I’ve seen for a long time. You can you scan an area and then proceed by pasting the text (you don’t even have to copy the text) whereever you want. Moreover you can save time and unnecessary inconvenience for an app which is really easy to use. - I would strongly recommend it! By the way: Nice, simple and beautiful design. Ich nutze das Programm derzeit für meine Abschlussarbeit und ich kann nur sagen: Eine nützlichere App habe ich seit langem nicht mehr benutzt. Es erspart Zeit und Mühen und ist sehr benutzerfreundlich. Daher nur weiterzuempfehlen.

Diese App ist einfach super und intuitiv zu bedienen und tut das, was es soll: Text markieren von Bilder, Ebooks und Co., Text kopieren und blitzschnell einfügen. Spart jede Menge Zeit und Nerven, da man so nie wieder beschäftigt ist, Dinge abzutippen, die nicht kopierbar sind. Die App erkennt jedes Wort und ist eine super Hilfe! Danke für die App, das Geld ist auf jeden Fall sehr gut angelegt! ;) In case someone doesn’t understand German, here’s what I wrote in English: This app is awesome and easy to use. It does exactly what the description box says: You can copy texts from pictures, E-books and all that stuff in an blink of an eye. You no longer have to waste time with copying texts out. The OCR works very well and is a great help when writing essays for university. Thanks for the app, it’s totally worth the money! ;)

Always looking for a better OCR application. Maybe this is it, maybe not ! After opening the app it appears that there are no Preferences (greyed out) and no help either. There is a user sign up for the blog, to hopefully seek info, but no way to enrol and get a log-in. I’ve just updated to 10.9 and it work no better than in 10.8.

I dont have to worry about what filles i can upload i just open them with their default application and it works like a screenshot.

App needs an update soon…the last one was back in 2014!!!

Quest’app è semplicemente favolosa. Se avete un’immagine in formato jpg o simile e volete estrarre il suo testo allora non dovete più preoccuparvi. Non dovete assolutamente riscrivere il testo. E’ veloce e molto precisa e vale ogni centesimo che spendete. La raccomando vivamente. This app is simply fantastic. If you have an image in jpg or similar formats and need to extract its text, then worry no more. You don’t have to rewrite the text. It’s fast and very precise and is worth every cent you pay for it. Highly recommended.

I use three screens—MacBook built-in, a big Dell, and a third driven via DisplayLink USB. Condense consistently grabs an image from one screen to the left of the select area. On the actual leftmost screen, it scans ~90% of the area, then goes unresponsive. All I can do then is quit. Also, the loud click sounds it plays as you click Condenses buttons are annoying as heck and cannot be disabled.

Once you set up the keyboard shortcut, this app rocks! The work flow is a lot like tinygrab. Ive found it to be really useful and definitely recommend it for just a couple bucks.

Have Aperture project with many scanned photos with each photos caption as part of image scan. Needed to quickly OCR the caption part of image to use in metadata/tags/captions of each image. This just worked. Great time saver for me. Could use a help file and a little more explicit/exactly this is how to use it the first time.

works out of the box. so simple. so intuitive. 5 stars from here.

I do a lot of scanning of old documents which need text recognition for archiving. I typically use Adobe Acrobat, but it does not always work. I read about this in MacLife and got all excited — OCR text recognition software, on the cheap (~$3). This program takes up too much space on the HD, is very cumbersome to use, and the worst part is, it only extracts text that one has to paste into another document (e.g., Word). I was expecting a pdf output. Clearly I was expecting too much, but at the same time, the perceived utility of this software is deceiveing.

I must regularly deal with images that contain text information, and remaking such images is best done by grabbing the text and starting over with layouts. Condense works very well indeed for clean text captures/scans, and the option to leave line formatting or lump all text is helpful. It allows you to select only what you want, does the OCR and holds it on the clipboard with two clicks and one drag selection. When the text is complex (background textures, previously scanned or high-contrast) the contrast control options do a remarkable job of improving accuracy. Mr. johannesmeyer seems committed to entertaining further refinements and improvements, so I believe my 3 bucks were well spent.

I didn’t need a full OCR suite—I was simply looking for something that would save me the tedious process of reproducing the Chinese characters I was unfamiliar with and having them read to me. On that front, this app could not have been better! It’s a clean interface with simple controls for a simple purpose. Easy enough. Combined with a note program in your menu bar, this makes the clunky full OCRs look even clunkier! Plus, this actually supports langauges that the others don’t! If there’s one thing I want to change, some languages read right to left, not left to right, and/or up and down columns as in contrast to rows and this app doesn’t take that into account. However, that’s just a few additional clicks and buttons, so I’m not too put out.

This is as close as you can get to copy/paste of text from an image. I hit my hotkey, draw a box around some text in an image, and paste it where I need it. Dead simple and really handy.

This app is easy to use. I used it with my Epson scanner using Mac OS X Image Capture app. You scan in at 300 dpi with such scanning software and display the scan as big as you can get it on the screen. Having the scanned text open in Preview.app is best. Then you switch to Condense and select the scanned text. Within a few seconds the text is recognized and sent to your computer’s memory. Then I pasted it into Word. VERY accurate with higher definition scanning and large screen display. Smaller dpi scans and smaller screen size makes for innacurate character recognition. I have to reformat the text, with a little spell checking, but 15 pages of text were accurately scanned in a few minutes. Go to Condense’s menu and check run in Menubar. Then you can switch from scan software to Condense from the top menubar of your desktop. Of course, I would like to see Condense maintain the original text’s format. Perhaps that may follow. Very good usability at a very good price.

Cant speak to previous versions, but save your money on this one. It cant even OCR a simple business card set in a clean san serif typeface.

When we think we have discovered and invented everything to facilitate our daily tasks, I found this amazing application. Congratulations on creativity and for facilitating part of my tasks.

I’m amazed at the negative reviews of this app, which are apparently from people who haven’t taken the time to explore its capabilities. Like any tool, it takes time to learn how to use it properly, and to recognize its limitations. These limitations are not the fault of the developer; they are inherent in the screen and formatting. Here’s some tips: - When I OCR a page on my ScanSnap scanner, I do so at 200 PPI or more, and OCR works almost perfectly. My iMac’s screen has a resolution of 109 PPI, and Condense STILL works quite well. Objectively, this is surprising. It is a credit to the developer that it works at all! - The new Retina iMac is 218 PPI. That’s four times the area resolution! Obviously this app works best with a Retina display, since the fonts are more crisply defined. (A 13-inch MacBook Pro is even better, at 227 PPI). - The OCR engine gets confused by underlined text, as are used in many links. Makes sense - the underline runs into the font’s descenders. There’s not much the developer can do about that. Cut him some slack. - Serif fonts seem to work a bit better than Sans Serif. Of course, you seldom have any option when OCRing text… - Like with any scanner, the smaller the font, the poorer the OCR. But on a Mac, one can generally expand the text quite easily. Use Command + in Safari, or just use the Reader function. The OCR will improve significantly. Finally, don’t ignore the multi-language capabilities. My wife is a super-knitter and often uses German or Japanese patterns. Being able to OCR some of the instructions and use Google Translate to read them is very cool. Wonder if she’s interested in my getting a Retina iMac - purely for her patterns, of course…

This app does one very cool thing: It snips anything on your screen and turns it into text that you can paste into another document. The OCR is pretty good, but you have to proofread carefully. I use this all the time for legal work when I receive a PDF that I need to extract a small part of to use elsewhere. I use it almost every day, but I only bought it because it was on sale. I own Adobe Acrobat and could OCR the entire document, but I don’t need all of that. (And Adobe’s OCR is worse and it crashes frequently.) I really never thought Condense would be this useful, but it is. I gave it 4 stars because the OCR makes some error each time I capture something. The directions say to zoom in and make the words bigger before clipping to improve OCR. I should try that more often. Watch Apple make this ability part of Preview some day (if the get the rest of Preview 8.0 working first).