Office 365, Proofing Tools and OCR in OneNote

OCR in OneNote

OneNote provides OCR functionality that allows you to search and copy text from images and printouts. Onetastic provides a Select Text From Image feature which utilizes this. You can also pick which language OneNote should use to recognize the text. This is important especially for non-latin scripts, which would look like garbage if it used English for instance. You can select the language from the right click menu:

Adding Languages

You can add more languages to this list for free by installing proofing tools. To do so you can go to File > Options > Language and click on the link that says:

Issues with Office 365

This worked fine in OneNote 2010 and OneNote 2013 MSI installations. However most users now get Office through online channels and download it using the Click-2-Run technology. Office 365 works this way for most users. Unfortunately the proofing tools are MSI based and does not work well with Click-2-Run. Users had problem getting especially the East Asian languages to work with this. Installing the proofing tools would work and you would get spell checking for these languages, however OCR won't work.

The language packs install certain files to the incorrect location for Office 365 since they expect an MSI based Office installation. This can be actually manually fixed by moving the installed files to the correct location.

Fixing the Installation Issue

The MSI install location for office is one of the following:

• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\office15
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\office15

The C2R install location for Office 365 is one of the following:

• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15

The files are incorrectly installed in the former locations and need to be copied to the latter locations. Below are the names of the files for East Asian languages. Some of these files may already be in the correct location (already installed by original installation). So you just need to copy the missing ones.

File List

Japanese

• twrecj.dll
• jptree.dat
• jpprint.dat
• jpprint2.dat
• jpserht.dat
• jpcode.uni
• tw_us.dat
• tw_su.dat

Simplified Chinese

• twrecc.dll
• sccode.uni
• sctree.dat
• scprint.dat
• scprint2.dat
• scserht.dat
• tw_gu.dat
• tw_ug.dat

Traditional Chinese

• twrecc.dll
• tccode.uni
• tctree.dat
• tcprint.dat
• tcprint2.dat
• tcserht.dat
• tw_bu.dat
• tw_ub.dat

Korean

• twreck.dll
• twcutlkr.dll
• twlaykr.dll
• krcode.uni
• krdist.dat
• krprint.dat
• krserht.dat
• krtree.dat
• tw_uk.dat
• tw_ku.dat
• HangulLb.dat
• datasim.dat

Once you copy the files and restart OneNote OCR should start working. Let me know if you have issues with other languages and I can probably figure out what files are needed.

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