JScan is tool for performing OCR and viewing document images; specifically, document images in the TIFF and MODI formats. JScan was designed primarily for use with the MODI format and working in conjunction with the Microsoft Office tools.

Pros: Paperless office has been a target for a while. It is not going to be achieved anytime soon but increasing use of electronic documents are leading all of us there. First step in reaching paperless goal always is to get the existing document into electronic form and getting paper documents is the first step towards that. The next step is to get these scanned documents into ASCII text form. That makes the documents fully searchable besides occupying less space on the hard disk storage.

JScan is an application that helps convert images, helps viewing and organizing them. The images handled are for document images in particular. These are what is produced by scanners and/or fax machines. OCR or the optical character recognition is the best tool to convert scanned text into machine recognized text. OCR includes formatting information too along with recognized character data. The two formats handled by the application are the TIFF or the .tif and the Microsoft Document Image Format or the Microsoft Office Document Images (MODI) or the .mdi. MODI was introduced along with Office 2003. With this support the user can work with Office tools on the JScan converted documents. One can get excellent text recognition results with MODI algorithms.

This application is able to view both TIFF and MODI formats, interconvert between the two formats, do conversion on a group of files or a single one and then handle printing of course.

Cons: There’s a inherent limitation of OCR technology that 100% recognition is difficult though with machine generated fonts the success rate is close to the ideal. Whenever documents are converted, there is always the need to do a bit of manual editing.

The application has a simple interface and is easy to use. Overall rating is 3 stars.