FreeOCR

Ready for use with Windows 8 and absolutely free, Softi FreeOCR is an accurate optical character recognition application that allows you to scan a document and then convert it to an editable text. Recently simply referred to as FreeOCR, this program utilizes the Tesseract OCR PDF engine created by Google and developed between 1985 and 1995 at Hewlett Packard. One of the top 3 OCR engines in terms of accuracy, it is open source and continually maintained. This wonderful program takes what would be hours of retyping and eliminates that by recognizing the letters and layout of a scanned image and rendering them as text.

Taking up a mere 411KB, FreeOCR allows you to scan in multiple images as one document and convert all of the pages with one conversion. A very simple set up, the main screen has five options along the top covering scanning, opening files, opening PDFs, saving your files as JPGs, and a few OCR specifications you can use to fine tune the process. Once the page or pages are in, you are allowed to flip through them as well as drag them, rotate them, crop them, or resize them based on how you want them to appear as a document. There is also a screen where you can set up various aspects of the font (style, family, size, or effects) for when the characters are converted. Once all the specifics fit your liking, simply choose the Microsoft Word symbol along the center menu, and a DOC will open in Word, allowing you to either change every letter in the document or just the formatting.

By downloading Softi FreeOCR, you are saving yourself hours of unnecessary retyping when there are only hard copies of documents that need to be edited available. Equipped with automatic updates as well as Tesseract technology, this document converter is one of the best on the market today. Highly proficient and accurate, there are only a few errors you may need to correct after the conversion happens. Along with image to text, you can save your scans as PDFs, JPGs, or PNGs without the hassle of figuring out the overly complex software that comes with scanners. The biggest issue is only for the Windows XP users as the .Net Framework V2.0 must be installed to enable scanning to the desktop. Try Soft FreeOCR and never retype a document again.