FreeOCR is a free optical character recognition software (OCR) for the desktop. It runs on Microsoft Windows and supports scanning from most Twain scanners and processing PDFs, multi-page TIFF images, and other popular image formats. The application exports the content in plain text and can also export it directly into Microsoft Word format.
In a previous post, we introduced Copyfish OCR, which provides similar features. Copyfish is available as an extension for Firefox and Google Chrome but not as stand-alone software. However, Copyfish can translate the converted text directly into other languages. It does this by using the Google Translate service. But if you don’t need the translation feature, then an important and highly convenient feature of this software is that you don’t need an internet connection to run it. And since you don’t process anything online, you don’t have to worry about security issues related to confidential documents. However, since you need to download software, you should have a good virus scanner on your machine.
FreeOCR uses the latest Tesseract v3.01 OCR engine. It is very easy to use and supports the opening of multi-page TIFF documents, Adobe PDF documents, fax documents, and most types of images, including compressed TIFF images, which the Tesseract engine cannot read by itself.
FreeOCR V4 includes Tesseract V3, which improves accuracy by using page layout analysis.
OCR Engine
The included Tesseract OCR PDF engine is an open-source product from Google. It was developed in the Hewlett Packard laboratories between 1985 and 1995. In 1995, it was one of the top three OCR entrepreneurs to enter the OCR competition at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. The Tesseract engine’s source code is now maintained by Google and the project can be found here.
License
FreeOCR is a free OCR and scanning software and you can do everything you want, including commercial use. The included Tesseract OCR engine is distributed under the Apache V2.0 license.
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