Free Applications to Convert Scanned Images to Text / Word Documents
When you scan any Document page, it cannot be edited because you get Image file as output. Now, for making changes in it fro further use- It has to be re-typed so, to avoid and reduce your effort of doing the same typing work again, here are some open source freeware application which can convert scanned document images to editable text documents (more probably DOC or MS Word file).
These software are better called as OCR (optical character recognition software). This technique is more useful in office work which can save time and for other important documents like Project reports, Certificates, etc. where you can get same format of design and fonts used.
1. Free OCR
Softi Free OCR is a complete scan and OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine also known as a Tesseract GUI. It includes a Windows installer and It is very simple to use and supports multi-page tiff’s, Adobe PDF and fax documents as well as most image types including compressed TIFF.
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2. OCR Desktop
OCR Desktop Application is a desktop utility that generates ASCII text from images such as a bitmap or image file. Incorporating Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, and trained with over 4 million font variations; OCR utility incorporate the latest optical character recognition technology to solve your OCR problems. For Mass conversion, they have have Folder conversion utility which can convert all files from a folder on the go.
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3. Simple OCR
With SimpleOCR, you could easily and accurately convert that paper document into editable electronic text for use in any application including Word and WordPerfect. Not only is SimpleOCR up to 99% accurate, it is 100% free.
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4. Top OCR
It handles images with mixed text and graphics (Manual or Auto Zoning) and tolerates skew and uneven lighting. Multiple text output formats, including searchable PDF and HTML can be obtained. It can read 11 different languages and Includes built-in, full featured Text and Image WYSIWYG Editors.
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5. Images 2 Open XML
images2openXML is a freeware which converts scanned documents to Office 2007 new format (OpenXML) using Office 2007 OCR engine & OpenXML. It is still in alpha stage and requires supporting applications like Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, OpenXML SDK 1.0 and Office 2007.
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Web – Service (installation free)
Lastly, If you don’t prefer downloading and installing any software on your system then you may go for online webservice, Free Online OCR. Here you need to upload any image file and get output file as text document to be used anywhere.
