FreeOCR is a complete scan and OCR program. It is simple to use and supports multi-page tiff`s as well as fax documents.

Pros: FreeOCR is a complete scan and OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free OCR engine V2.00. It is installed through a Windows installer. Best of all it is totally free for personal as well as commercial use. The user interface is very simple and has two prominent display areas on the screen. One part on the left is fore the scanned input, the screen on the right contains the OCR’ed output. Just a few controls and a language selection make up the complete interface. The Tesseract free OCR engine is an open source product now maintained by Google. It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories more than a decade back. In 1995 it was one of the top 3 performers at the OCR accuracy contest organized by University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Between 1995 and 2006 it had little work done on it, but it is probably one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. The source code will read a binary, grey or color image and output text. A tiff reader is built in that will read uncompressed TIFF images, or libtiff can be added to read compressed images. Free OCR 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. FreeOCR requires the .Net Framework V2.0 from Microsoft and needs be installed prior to installing the OCR engine.

It supports multi-page tiff`s, 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 scanning included and support for multi-page Tiff documents. Multilingual support is available and support for English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch exist already. Scripts to test accuracy against the original 1995 tests run by UNLV are also available so that one can make sure the OCR works correctly. The program can be trained in other language and scripts too.

Cons: Nothing problematic seen.

Overall: This certainly is a 4 star package that performs quite so well in a crucial function like character recognition.