Need good OCR for printed source code listing, any ideas?

Question

At my work, I sometimes have to take some printed source code and manually type the source code into a text editor. Do not ask why.

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)?

Answer 1

Google Drive's built-in OCR worked pretty well for me. Just convert scans to a PDF, upload to Google Drive, and choose "Open with... Google Docs". There are some weird things with color and text size, but it still includes semicolons and such.

The original screenshot: The Google Docs OCR:

Plaintext version:

#include <stdio.h> int main(void) { 
char word[51]; int contains = -1; int i = 0; int length = 0; scanf("%s", word); while (word[length] != "\0") i ++; while ((contains == 1 || contains == 2) && word[i] != "\0") { 
if (word[i] == "t" || word[i] == "T") { 
if (i <= length / 2) { 
contains = 1; } else contains = 2; 
return 0;