Review: FreeOCR extracts text ably

FreeOCR is a nice, simple front-end for HP's public domain Tesseract OCR engine (now used by Google) and is roughly the installable equivalent of the unrelated Free-OCR website. It interfaces directly with scanners in addition to importing image files and extracts text into a box from which you can cut and paste. The program is extremely easy to use and works well if all you want is text. It even extracts text from PDFs, though it exports only to text.

FreeOCR's interface is straightforward and easy to understand.

FreeOCR processes only one image at a time, but it does OCR multi-page PDFs. And, unlike the Free-OCR website, there's no limit on file size. Also, FreeOCR can create Word and RTF documents from the text it extracts, but it's just pasted text: There's no attempt to reconstruct the document or place images.

Although it's confusing, you can opt out of unwanted toolbars and a change of browser home page.

As far as it goes, FreeOCR is a neat little program, though it tries to install toolbars and reset your browser home page. You can install the program while cancelling and declining all offers, but though it's unintuitive and the negative response buttons are grayed out.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks.
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Review: Free-OCR performs adequately on text docs

Free-OCR If your OCR needs are small, then this limited but free online service will extract your text just fine.

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To convert only a few small documents. there's no need to install a full-blown OCR program. You can use a free service like Free-OCR (also known as Free-OCR.com) and upload a scan of your document. File size is limited to 2MB and 5000 pixels in any direction, about 150 dpi for a standard page. The OCR engine handles 29 languages, including English.

Let's give Free-OCR some credit for admitting that CAPTCHAs are annoying.

Although you don't have to register or even fork over your email address, the Free-OCR site does make you fill in one of those annoying CAPTCHAs. (Thanks, Web bad guys, for making everyone's life more difficult.) Those CAPTCHAs serve to remind one just how difficult OCR can be. If humans, with our incredible heuristic abilities, occasionally have problems with these, just think how poor straight-line software perusing a stream of bits must feel.

Free-OCR did a decent job of extracting the text from my test documents. With standard typed pages, you should have no problems. The site does not output files or recreate documents. It simply places the extracted text in a box for cutting and pasting. As a matter of fact, embedded graphics tend to confuse the output.

Free-OCR does a nice job on text, but has trouble with even simple graphic elements.

Free-OCR is not suitable for large jobs or overly complex documents, but when all you need is to quickly get the text out of a basic document scan, it does nicely in most cases.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use this Web-based software.

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