Api for OCR and reading .pdf and .doc(x) files

Question

Hi Guys,

Happy new year to you all!

I am trying to write an app that will read the text in an image, a .pdf or .doc(x) file and extract some information from it. I want this app to be a universal windows app. Is there an api for performing these actions?

Thanks and God bless.

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The best things in life are free, but the most valuable ones are costly...use opportunities well for there are others like you who deserves them, but don't have them...

Answer 1

No built-in APIs, but I am sure there are third-party APIs for this.

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Matt Small - Microsoft Escalation Engineer - Forum Moderator
If my reply answers your question, please mark this post as answered.

NOTE: If I ask for code, please provide something that I can drop directly into a project and run (including XAML), or an actual application project. I'm trying to help a lot of people, so I don't have time to figure out weird snippets with undefined objects and unknown namespaces.

Answer 2

For OCR see the WindowsPreview.Media.Ocr namespace. I'm not aware of any API which will interpret PDF or doc files in a Windows Runtime app. For the Windows side you could use the in-box PDF API to generate a bitmap and then OCR it.

Answer 3

Sorry about missing the OCR part.

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Matt Small - Microsoft Escalation Engineer - Forum Moderator
If my reply answers your question, please mark this post as answered.

NOTE: If I ask for code, please provide something that I can drop directly into a project and run (including XAML), or an actual application project. I'm trying to help a lot of people, so I don't have time to figure out weird snippets with undefined objects and unknown namespaces.

Answer 4

Thanks. I will test the conversion of PDF to image and then use the OCR engine.

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The best things in life are free, but the most valuable ones are costly...use opportunities well for there are others like you who deserves them, but don't have them...