a free ocr program?

I need a program to scan Images in PDF Files and recognise the text, so I can copy/paste into Microsoft Word.

Where can I find such a program?

 

What type of scanner do you have? did you try the companies support pages, sometimes they might have. I have an older Canoscan and it works perfect with the Microsoft Office Document Imaging. I have the 2007 Office Professional Plus Beta 2 disk, and I am loving it! So maybe try the trial version to see if it's what you need. Also the pdf2picture program I heard is decent...Good luck!!

http://www.pdf2picture.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testdrive.mspx

:sony:

 

Which version of MS Office do you have? Office 2003 comes with Microsoft Office Document Imaging. This software can do the following, among other things:

• Perform optical character recognition (OCR) in a scanned document or a fax. For example, after recognizing text in a scanned document or a fax, you can search for specific text, or copy text to another program.
• Copy text and images from a scanned document or a fax and paste in any Office program.

 

Well, Thx people, but a friend told me how OCR software is really unable to correctly identify all letters at all times. So, not wanting to take the risk, i typed out the few pages that I needed.

 

Yeah, you have to go through and proof it, but with big transcription jobs it's a lifesaver.

 

Does Microsoft Document Imaging save to PDF? I though it saved only to TIFF or Microsofts proprietary .mdi format?

 

It saves TIF, but you can copy and paste the text into any other application like OO Writer or InDesign. To make a PDF you'll need either Acrobat Standard/Professional, Acrobat Distiller (came with Pagemaker), or one of the several free PDF printers out there for Windows.

 

PDFCreator is free and open source.