Blacked out text can be text that was input by the user, comments in source code, or areas of an image that are not relevant to your current task. It may also occur due to errors – there is no way for a machine to “correct this for you” because blacked out text can’t be deciphered without knowing what it previously said.
How to see Through Blacked out Text
With ABBYY FineReader’s Optical Character Recognition technology you can quickly recover the obscured information, by converting the blurred or blacked-out text into a computer-readable format so that it can be edited and saved in its original form.
To recover blacked out text follow the steps below:
1) Open the image with blacked out text in your photo or document editor, for example Adobe Acrobat Reader or Adobe Photoshop. Make sure that the page is completely visible on the screen.
2) Click anywhere in the image and start ABBYY FineReader. If you do not have ABBYY FineReader for OCR installed on your computer yet, install it.
3) In ABBYY FineReader, go to Recognition – Advanced OCR.
4) In the “Recognition” section, click on the “OCR” tab. Then check the box next to “Enable recognition of black-and-white images”, then press OK.
5) Click Save image in ABBYY FineReader or save it in another program you are using.
6) Edit found text as you desire.
7) Save the edited document. That’s all!
Some common reasons why is text blacked out
1) The text is a comment in source code that should not be shown to the user.
2) The text is a section of an image that should not be visible for some reason.
3) Text has been typed/pasted by a user, and it contains errors which prevent OCR from recovering it automatically. In this case you can make the text visible using FineReader’s OCR technology.
4) Text is obscured by shadows or reflections. The text can only be recovered when the image is viewed in good lighting conditions.
5) Images of printed pages often contain gibberish characters typical for images of printed pages. To correct this, you have to set the correct type face for your document in ABBYY FineReader/FineReader Express Scanning Software.
6) Letters are too small or too large because they are magnified or reduced on the screen. To recover text from such images it is usually necessary to zoom in or out to make the font size more appropriate for OCR.
Examples of When Blacked out Text can be Used
Text that has been blacked out might be used in:
- Educational materials, where some parts of the text are considered as spoilers and should not be visible beforehand;
- Banking applications and medical software, where information about a particular client or patient is obscured;
- Online newspapers with payment options, where the price of the publication is shown only after the purchase has been completed.
What is ABBYY FineReader
ABBYY FineReader is an award-winning optical character recognition (OCR) and document management solution that has been solving the problems associated with converting paper documents into digital format.
ABBYY FineReader enables you to quickly convert your paper documents into a digital format that can be easily searched, archived, shared and managed – saving time and money.
Is ABBYY FineReader Free
ABBYY FineReader is available in two versions – free and professional. The free version of ABBYY FineReader has all the core OCR capabilities for processing text documents, performing character recognition on images with mixed text elements (OCR engines cannot process images that contain both image and blended text), converting PDF files into editable formats, searching for text within PDF files, converting image-only PDFs into editable formats.
The professional version contains both the core functionality of ABBYY FineReader together with extended OCR capabilities for processing text documents, performing character recognition on mixed text images , recognizing non-standard fonts, converting PDF files into editable formats, searching for text within PDF files, converting image-only PDFs and searchable PDFs into editable formats, editing OCR output.
Conclusion
Blacked out text is used in many applications for various reasons. One of the most common uses of blacked out text is when you want to hide sensitive or private information from users and it is sometimes necessary to view and edit the contents of a document which has been blacked out. For situations like this we recommend using ABBYY FineReader, a recognized leader in OCR and document management. Furthermore, FineReader can help you convert documents with blacked out text into editable formats that can be easily searched and archived.
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