Anyone know a good free OCR program?

[Ju1cyJ]

Title says it all.

 

[nagger]

Good and Free don't mix well in the same sentence when the subject is OCR, IMHO.

Even those OCR programs that are expensive aren't that good.

I've been using OmniPage Pro 11 for the last couple of months and I'm reasonably happy with the results I'm getting while OCR'ing english pages, haven't had much luck when doing the same thing in portuguese or spanish. One cool feature this program has is the direct capturing of PDF files.

 

[Rand]

I've yet to find a 'good' free OCR program, OmniPage LE comes bundled with many scanners.... it's not very good but still better thn most of the free OCR software I've seen.

Even OmniPage Pro 11 which is generally regarded as the best could still use improvement IMHO.

If you really need a decent OCR proggy your pretty much forced to purchase one from what I've seen.
OmniPage Pro 11 doesnt come cheaply either as it's gonna cost you at least $450.

ScanSoft's TextBridge Pro Millennium is available much cheaper, at $79 but isnt very good IMHO. Still it's far better then free software.
Many people think that ABBYY FineReader 5.0 Pro is better then even OmniPage Pro 11 though, and has only $99 it's much cheaper.
It's a pretty good piece of software, and while I prefer OmniPage because FineReader is a bit weak on low resolution images and doesnt support importing Adobe PDF documents for further OCR work.. which is very important for me.
Otherwise it's in some respects even more accurate then OmniPage Pro 11, and has a very flexible feature set.

If you need a budget OCR solution I'd certainly go for FineReader 11... and unless your doing work with low resolution images, or need bit better flexibility with .PDF documents then it's likely at least as good as OmniPage.