This conversion is named Optical Character Recognition or OCR for short, and it can convert scanned books and documents into editable text, to get editable text from PDFs created via scanning, or even get text from screenshots and images. There are a variety of tools available for character recognition and some of them are free to use. This article will help you find and choose between several free OCR tools. Note: this article was last updated on June 18th, 2013. This update added a host of additional tools that offer free OCR functionality, many of these we found through reader comments, so thank you for helping us make this article better. Wifi Radar Para Opensuse here. Online OCR services vs.

Desktop OCR software Selecting the right OCR tool depends on your specific needs. Generally OCR tools can be divided into two – online services and desktop software, both of them have their positive and negative sides.

Online services will require that you upload your files on the internet to their servers, so there may be privacy concerns as well as time/bandwidth concerns if your document is big. Most have limits to file size and count of pages to process daily/weekly that they will process for free; for bigger jobs they require to buy extra processing power. On the flip side, many of these services are really good at the OCR itself.