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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T05:53:54+00:00

I sometimes have to take some printed source code and manually type the source

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I sometimes have to take some printed source code and manually type the source code into a text editor.

Obviously typing it up takes a long time and always extra time to debug typing errors (oops missed a "$" sign there).

I decided to try some OCR solutions like:

  • Microsoft Document Imaging – has built in OCR
  • Result: Missed all the leading whitespace, missed all the underscores, interpreted many of the punctuation characters incorrectly.
  • Conclusion: Slower than manually typing in code.
  • Various online web OCR apps
  • Result: Similar or worse than Microsoft Document Imaging
  • Conclusion: Slower than manually typing in code.

I feel like source code would be very easy to OCR given the font is sans serif and monospace.

Have any of you found a good OCR solution that works well on source code?

Maybe I just need a better OCR solution (not necessarily source code specific)?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    With OCR, there are currently three options:

    • Abbee FineReader and OminPage. Both are commercial products which are about on par when it comes to features and OCR result. I can’t say much about OmniPage but FineReader does come with support for reading source code (for example, it has a Java language library).
    • The best OSS OCR engine is tesseract. It’s much harder to use, you’ll probably need to train it for your language.

    I rarely do OCR but I’ve found that spending the $150 on the commercial software weights out the wasted time by far.

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