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Free OCR Tools

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a technology to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into text so that they are editable and searchable.

There are both free & commercial tool-kits.

Free -
  1. SimpleOCR - 9.3MB application. SDK/Command Line versions are commercially available
  2. InstantOCR - web based OCR
  3. OCR Terminal beta - web based OCR, converts TIFF, JPEG, GIF, BMP formats to .doc, .txt, .rtf, .xml formats; PDF to Word
Free, Under development -
  1. GOCR
  2. Tesseract
Commercial OCR Toolkits -
  1. ABBYY FineReader
  2. OmniPage
Also see:
Experimental OCR feature to create editable Google Documents from high-res images
HOW TO identify a Font