OCR French: searchable PDFs with accents and œ

French OCR is mostly about the small marks: é read as e, ç read as c, the œ in cœur split into two letters. A page that drops them still looks right, but a search for “société” misses it. Inklight reads French scans on your own Windows or Linux PC and writes a searchable PDF beside each one. French is one of the six languages its recognition is tested on, and a French word list ships with the app. Inklight outlines the words it is unsure about, and you check them.

How it works in Inklight

Drop the scans or PDFs on the Processing Queue, or scan straight from your scanner. Each file becomes a Job. Inklight recognizes it in the background and writes {name}_ocr.pdf next to the original. You do not pick a language. Inklight reads each document against the word lists of the languages it finds on the page, up to two, so a French contract with an English annex needs no setting.

When a file is done, its card says how many words are left to check. Click Check words to step through them. A word read without its accent is not in the French word list, so it does not pass as a known word. When the two recognition models read it differently, both readings appear and you press 1 or 2:

Enter accepts a word, typing replaces it, Tab skips it. Inklight writes every decision into the searchable PDF’s text layer straight away.

The Check pass also groups the same word across files. If societe turns up on four pages of two contracts, you see it once, marked “×4 in 2 documents”, with the line of each other copy below it. One decision writes société into every copy whose box stays ticked. Clear a box to decide that copy on its own. Case counts, so Societe at the start of a sentence forms a group of its own.

What you get

• Searchable PDFs from French scans, PDFs and photos, made on your machine. Nothing is uploaded. Every plan.
• Accents, cedillas and œ kept in the text layer as read, so search and copy work with the real spelling.
• French PDFs that already have text on every page are left alone. In a PDF where only some pages have text, Inklight recognizes the others and keeps the rest of the file. Every plan.
• The shipped French word list, used to decide which uncertain words need a look. Every plan.
• IBAN check, French IBANs included: one whose checksum fails is the first word the Check pass shows. Every plan.
• Clean pages without the footer. Free writes a small footer on every page; Personal and Business do not.
• Hot folders that turn every scan dropped into a folder into a searchable PDF. Business.

Limits

• Inklight reads printed Latin-script text. Handwriting is not read.
• The six tested languages are English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch.
• Word lists ship for 13 languages, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch among them. There is no Latin list, so no list can clear an uncertain word in a phrase such as a contrario, and it goes to the Check pass.
• Only words the Check pass flags are outlined. A word misread with high confidence by both models is not, so compare names and amounts you rely on with the scan. Check and fix OCR errors shows how.
• Windows and Linux only. There is no macOS version.

More guides

• OCR German: umlauts and ß
• OCR Spanish: accents and ñ
• ABBYY FineReader alternative: buy once, run on Linux

Get started

Download Inklight for Windows or Linux. Every install starts with a seven-day Business trial; see the plans for what stays free.