Softi Software

Scan to PDF software

FreeOCR.net V2.6 Free PDF OCR Software

Last Updated Jan 2009, using the Tesseract engine v2.03

Changes/new features

Minor bug fixes to PDF rendering code (from v2.5)
PDF button - can now open and OCR scanned PDF files
Images from a scanned document can be selected and placed on the clipboard
Scans can be cropped before OCR
Added button to remove line breaks from the OCR'ed text
Fixed some bugs causing FreeOCR to crash when opening PNG's
Improved user interface

About Free OCR

Softi Free OCR is a complete scan and OCR program 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 multi-page tiff's, 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 has Twain and WIA scanning.

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 for scanned PDF is freeware 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.

Screen shot V2.5

Download

Operating System	Recommended Minimum Specification
Windows 2000 Windows 2003 Windows XP Windows Vista (all editions)	Pentium Processor - 200MHz 256 MB Memory (RAM) 10MB Free Disk Space SVGA Resolution Display .Net Framework 2.0 or higher

FreeOCR requires the .Net Framework V2.0 from Microsoft. If you do not have this installed then the FreeOCR installer will automatically detect & download this for you or you can download it here from Microsoft: .Net Framework 2.0

Latest V2.6 ~ 5 Mb
Click link below to download FreeOCR.net

Download Mirror1

Download Mirror2

This includes the English language Pack.

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 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. if you require compatible Scan to PDF software then please see our product page.

For more information see:

FreeOCR online help

Details on installing additional languages into FreeOCR

Contact

Please note that FreeOCR is Free software which is very popular and we do not have the resourses to provide technical support or answer any questions.

If you have any comments, bug reports or feature suggestions then you can email us at freeocr@softi.co.uk we read all your emails and comments but regretably may not have time to reply to you directly.