I have written before about the benefits of a paperless office, the zen feeling of being able to walk into the room and not somersault headfirst over a stack of paper and break your neck. But when you have reams of paper, how do you get all of that printed text converted into something that a digital program will be able to recognize and index? Yes, that’s right, you use an OCR service or app.

Text extraction with OCR7 Best Free OCR Software Apps to Convert Images Into Text7 Best Free OCR Software Apps to Convert Images Into TextWant OCR software for free? This article collects the seven best programs that turn images into text.Read More is a subject which we have covered endlessly, since MUO’s birth back in 2006. But the OCR apps in this area keep expanding, so here are 5 others you should look at, if you are looking to extract that text from a scanned documentThe 3 Best Free OCR Tools to Convert Your Files Back Into Editable DocumentsThe 3 Best Free OCR Tools to Convert Your Files Back Into Editable DocumentsOptical Character Recognition (OCR) software turns printed documents into machine-readable text. Here we show you the best free OCR tools and how they work.Read More.

1. FreeOCR

Text Extractor is a Mac app that does just that: It extracts text from an image PDF. If you want to create a duplicate text PDF — one laid out exactly as the original and with the same fonts — you’ll need one of those higher-priced OCR programs. Our text extractor tool support all the Outlook versions as well as OS versions, you can effortlessly extract text file format from Outlook 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2010 etc. Try demo version of text extractor software which extracts first 15 emails in Outlook PST files. The most important feature of an iPhone backup extractor is recovering messages, iBackup Viewer fully supports extracting iMessage and SMS text messages from iTunes backups, displaying iOS styled chat conversations, saving chats to pdf files and printing out to paper. The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a great way to share documents while preserving formatting, layout, and even security. But sometimes you need to copy some text from a PDF, and leave all of.

We start with software, entitled rather imaginatively, “FreeOCR”. It’s a Windows-only app, which works on all PC’s running XP and upwards (although if you are using XP, you will need to install an extra part).

FreeOCR works for TWAIN scanners, PDF files, and TIFF images, and outputs the text into a Microsoft Word file. To use this app, you will also need to download the Google Open Source Tesseract OCR engine.

2. FreeOCR to Word

This is the one I liked the most as it accurately transcribed what I had given it. The company behind the app promises 99.8% accuracy, and the app also retains the original formatting. As the title implies, the text and formatting are transferred into an editable Word document, but text (.txt) files are also possible.

It recognizes all of the main image formats, as well as Photoshop files. It’s just a shame though that all of these great apps are Windows-only. Where’s the love for Mac and Linux owners?

3. gImageReader

This one takes us back again to Google’s Tesseract OCR engine, which acts as the engine room to this rather well designed graphical frontend. The reader was handy because it automatically detects the page layout. Or if it makes a slight boob of it, you can manually readjust the areas.

The text is placed to the right of the image / scanned document, so you can see if everything is being taken down as it should. It does basic editing of that text, as well as spell checkingThe Top 5 OCR Spell Checking ToolsThe Top 5 OCR Spell Checking ToolsRead More (if you downloaded the relevant dictionary).

4. Capture2Text

This OCR tool serves a double role. First of all, it is a screenshot tool which then takes the screenshot and converts it into the Windows clipboard. You can then copy and paste the text into anywhere you want.

Secondly, it has voice recognition technology which transcribes your words for you. The site says this is experimental so don’t expect perfect results at the moment. Those with dreamy sultry accents like mine may experience difficulties.

5. VueScan

And you thought we would end without some Mac love, didn’t you? Well fear not, OSX’ers! If you need to do any OCR then here is VueScan to the rescue. It links to your scanner, and one of the advantages (the site actually lists it as a con) is that it is a very lightweight basic program. No bloat, but not too many features either. But it’s easy to install, easy to use, and it does its job, which is the main thing.

So which OCR programs float your boat? Are you a Google Drive OCR user perhaps? Or a user of another we haven’t covered here ? Let us know in the comments below.

How to get different voices for text to speech. How can the answer be improved?

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I just downloaded the Capture2Text utility (v4.5.1) from Sourceforge. It was simple to use, but the description in this article says that it does Voice recognition. That is not true. It does Text to speech (if enabled).
Looking for OCR that retains (saves, keeps) the images - that is in-text pictures, images or illustrations in place after the OCR is over. Does nobody care about that?? Searched over dozens of OCR reviews, not even a single one mentions a bit on how the software deals with internal graphic. On the entire internet there seems to be not even a single sreenshot of OCR software processing graphical element - only the text. Is graphics in books so unimportant to anybody? Frustrating. wrrr
Yunmai Technology is also a professional developer of (Optical Character Recognition) OCR software. It has been one of the best mobile OCR technology and application developers in the industry. Yunmai Document Recognition developed by Yunmai Technology is really nice. And it is free.
'a9t9 free ocr' is an *open-source* program that does exactly what FreeOCR does, but without the spyware and actually better ocr results: http://blog.a9t9.com/p/free-ocr-software.html
Have tried three times to subscribe.. but so far nothing in my inbox to confirm??
FreeOCR could not be downloaded, because AVAST antivir deletes it.
FreeOCR to Word is infected with 6(!) drive by installations and one behaviour scanner..
Thanks a lot!
Abbyy Screenshot Reader has done a great job for me for 100s of OCR (often google books) for years. Sometimes inexpensive, sometimes it has been available free.
Mark,
As a bichon frisé owner myself ( if you still remember Kicsi) I thank you for mentioning VueScan, the program I've been using for a while for scanning documents, as a text extraction tool from scanned images. Not that I will use it often, but it's good to know it exists in case I'll need it.
The FreeOCR to Word link sets off my virus scanner which is completely blocking the page. It doesn't like the favicon.ico for the page.
FreeOCR was pretty good when I tried it a few years ago. It had a very easy to use interface, which was especially helpful when trying to convert those image PDFs that aren't text.
There is no shortage of options for text editors geared towards developers on the Mac, but TextMate is our top pick. It wins out thanks to its massive programming language syntax support, helpful. Best programming text editor for mac. The Best Free Text Editors for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Lori Kaufman April 28, 2012, 12:00pm EDT. TeXstudio– Available for Windows