I always have a need here or there for some quick and easy OCR work. I used to use a combination of djpeg.exe and gocr.exe to handle my occasional conversion of text from images to text.
There are now a lot more newer programs out there that are a lot easier that those two files and appear to be a bit more reliable. My new favorites:
1) FreeOCR
FreeOCR is a Windows OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine. It includes a Windows installer and It is very simple to use and supports multi-page tiff’s, fax documents as well as most image types including compressed Tiff’s which the Tesseract engine on its own cannot read .It now has Twain scanning. It cannot open PDF’s at the moment but we are working on that. We may include Ghostscript to render PDF documents and our ultimate goal would be to create a searchable PDF. Free OCR uses the Tesseract OCR engine (see below)
2) Tesseract
The Tesseract free OCR engine is an open source product released by Google. It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995. In 1995 it was one of the top 3 performers at the OCR accuracy contest organized by University of Nevada in Las Vegas. The Tesseract engine source code is now maintained by Google.
3) WeOcr Tesseract Web Interface
With this website you can upload an image and get your text results all online with no software to download.
