Free OCR Scanning Software
Document Scanning Software with OCR
We are currently hosting the latest version of FreeOCR (V3)
FreeOCR supports scanning from most Twain scanners and can also open most scanned PDF's and multipage Tiff images as well as popular image file formats. FreeOCR outputs plain text and can export directly to Microsoft Word format.
FreeOCR OCR Software V3.0
Last Updated Jan 2010
Changes/new features
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PDF opening enhancements - speed and compatibility fixes
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Compatible with more scanners
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Fixed some bugs
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Improved user interface
About FreeOCR
Free OCR is a document scanning software 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 opening multi-page tiff documents, Adobe PDF and fax documents as well as most image types including compressed Tiff's which the Tesseract engine on its own cannot read .It now can scan using Twain and WIA scanning drivers.
The Tesseract OCR PDF engine is an open source product released by Google. It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995. In 1995 it was one of the top 3 performers at the OCR accuracy contest organized by University of Nevada in Las Vegas. The Tesseract engine source code is now maintained by Google and the project can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
FreeOCR is a freeware document scanning software and you can do what you like with it including commercial use. The included Tesseract free OCR engine is distributed under the Apache V2.0 license.
FreeOCR V4 is soon to be released this includes Tesseract V3 which increases accuracy and has page layout anaysis so more accurate results can be achieved without using the zone selection tool.
Download FreeOCR Document Scanning Software
Operating System |
Recommended Minimum Specification |
Windows 2000 |
Pentium Processor - 200MHz |
To enable scanning of images you will need a desktop document scanner that uses Twain or WIA compatible scanning drivers. FreeOCR requires the .Net Framework V2.0 from Microsoft. If you do not have this installed then the FreeOCR installer will automatically scan detect & download this for you. This framework is included with Vista and Windows 7 so only may need installing on XP.
Click
link below to download FreeOCR.net. This includes the English language Pack. For information on installing additional languages see the links below. |
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Instructions
After downloading Free OCR double click to install. The software is very simple to use.
Please note that the Tesseract OCR engine requires images at a resolution of 200 dpi or greater and as such it is not suited for reading PC screen shots which are only about 72dpi although we have made some enhancements in V2.3 which will produce better accuracy from low quality image sources. For best results scan you documents at 300 dpi greyscale.
Scanned PDF's
The PDF open button can open and render scanned PDF (Adobe Acrobat Documents) but is not designed to open complicated PDF's that contain text and images, after all there should be no need to OCR these PDF's as they contain text anyway and you can just select the text within Adobe reader.
The OCR PDF rendering in FreeOCR does not need any 3rd party software installed like Ghostscript or Adobe Acrobat to function and works only with PDF spec v1.6 documents.
For more information see:
Details on installing additional languages into FreeOCR
Contact
Please note that FreeOCR is Free software and we do not have the resourses to provide technical support or answer any questions. Please use the help links above.
Related Software
Have a look at Freeocr.net for a list of all free OCR programs available to download. Click Here
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Scan to PDF Software (not free)