FreeOCR

FreeOCR is optical character recognition software for Microsoft Windows. It is built on the Tesseract engine and wraps it in an installer and scanning tools, so ordinary users can turn scans into text.

What FreeOCR offers

• Scanner input — scans from most Twain scanners, and later versions also use WIA drivers.
• File import — opens scanned Adobe PDF files, multi-page Tiff images, fax documents and common picture formats, including compressed Tiff files that Tesseract alone cannot read.
• Output — writes plain text and exports straight into Microsoft Word format.
• Layout analysis — version 4 includes page analysis, so results are more accurate without drawing zones by hand.
• Image saving — can save scans as JPG files; a scan-to-PDF feature was described as in progress.

Key facts

• Licence: freeware that may be used commercially; the Tesseract engine is under the Apache 2.0 licence
• Latest release stated: March 2015, version 5
• Platform: Microsoft Windows