Can you make ChefTap clip recipes from books, magazines, PDFs, or pictures?

We’ve looked into adding the ability for ChefTap to use optical character recognition (OCR) to clip recipes from printed media and it’s not feasible at this time. First, the actual recognition of characters is not consistently accurate enough for ChefTap’s recipe recognizer to use. Additionally, OCR is optimized for text in columns and recipes are often printed in a different layout from the main article which can have the effect of interleaving the instructions and steps instead of listing all of the ingredients together followed by the steps. Finally, OCR doesn’t work well for paper that has been stained in any way and we all know what happens to paper recipes in the kitchen.

We’re keeping an eye on improvements in OCR technology and if it becomes feasible to use in ChefTap in the future, we’ll revisit this feature.