Top-10; Online OCR Tools / Converter

	OCR Tools	Languages	Input	Output	Sign-up
1	ABBYY FineReader Online	42	JPG, TIF, PCX, DCX, BMP, PNG, GIF, DJVU, DJV and PDF	DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PDF, RTF, TXT and ODT	Yes
2	Free OCR	29	JPG, GIF, TIFF and BMP	Webpage	No
3	Free Online OCR	En only	PDF, GIF, BMP, JPEG, TIFF and PNG	DOC, PDF, TXT and RTF	No
4	Google Docs	38	Any Image formats and PDF	ODT, PDF, RTF, TXT, DOC and HTML	Yes
5	i2OCR	33	TIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, PBM, PGM and PPM	DOC	No
6	New OCR	58	JPEG, JFIF, PNG, GIF, BMP, PBM, PGM, PPM, PCX, etc.	TXT, DOC, ODT, RTF, PDF and HTML	No
7	OCR Convert	35	JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF and PDF	TXT	No
8	OCR Online	153	JPG, TIFF, PNG, GIF and PDF	PDF, DOC, RTF and TXT	Yes
9	OCRextrACT	42	PDF, TIFF, PNG, JPG, BMP and PBM	TXT	No
10	Online OCR	32	JPG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF and GIF	DOC, XLS and TXT	No

Although most of these 10 free online OCR tools support multiple language

OCR is known as Optical Character recognitionwhich is a way to convert scanned image files into its machine readable text format.. If you come across this term, you might know that there are many OCR software comes that helps you to easily convert images into editable texts. OCR software comes handy when you want to use some text from the image and don’t have time to write it down.

Just perform OCR on an image and it will convert images in to texts that you can copy-paste in any program without need of retyping it again. You can use OCR software for digital photographs, printed books, documents, visting cards etc.

OCR software technology works around analyzing and comparing the document with the fonts stored in its database. Though, achieving 100% accuracy is not possible but it’s alway better to have something rather than nothing. Some of the OCR software includes spell checker to find out unrecognizable word and comes near to accuracy. Even, there are many online OCR toolsavailable to do the same task.

Most of the OCR software and online tools supports image formates like JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIP formates and converts it into HTML, TEXT, PDF versions. There are many tools OCR softwareand tools available in the market, but we are here focusing on best free OCR software and tools in this article.

If you are finding best suited OCR software and tools for you, look at our compilation of 9 freeOCR Softwares and online tools to convert your images into text. Don’t forget to tell your favorite one in the comments section below.

Best Free OCR Software

1) FreeOCR.net 3.0  : FreeOCR is a complete scan and OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free OCR engine. FreeOCR is small, simple and easy-to-use, and it includes a Windows installer and 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.

2) SimpleOCR  : Do you dread having to retype that document you are holding in your hand? If only you had the electronic file, your life would be so much easier. With SimpleOCR, you could easily and accurately convert that paper document into editable electronic text for use in any application including Word and WordPerfect. Not only is SimpleOCR up to 99% accurate, it is 100% free.

3) JOCR  : JOCR is a freeware. JOCR enables you to capture the image on the screen and convert the captured image to text. It is useful to revive the protected files whose text can not be copied. JOCR enables you to copy text from any files and images on the screen such as protected Web pages, PDF files, error messages. The program offers several capture modes.

4) Image to OCR Converter  : Image to OCR Converter is a text recognition software that can read text from bmp, pdf, tif, jpg, gif, png and all major image formats. Image to OCR Converter saves the extracted text in word, doc, pdf, html and text formats with accurate text formatting and spacing. Image to OCR Converter is an OCR tool that can convert any image or scanneddocument to all major text based formats in just one click. It avoids retyping of scanned documents by converting the scanned image and pdf files back to text based formats.

Best Free Online OCR Tools

5) Abbyy FineReader Online  : ABBYY FineReader Online – an online OCR service to provide accurate and swift conversion of scanned and photographed images and PDFs into editable Word, Excel, RTF, TXT and searchable PDF documents. A free account at FineReader Online will only let you convert a few pages and after that you will charged around $3 per 10 pages for additional conversions.

6) OCR Online  : OCR Online is an advanced web-based optical character recognition (OCR) application capable of turning scanned paper documents and digital photographs into text files that you can edit and search for text. OCR Online has superior multilingual support and is capable of processing documents in 153 languages providing prime quality for a single language or any combination of the languages it supports.

7) OCR Terminal  : OCR Terminal is an online OCR service that allows you to convert PDF to Word, JPEG to Word and scanned images into editable documents. Just sign up in seconds and get 20 free pages every month.

8 ) OnlineOCR.net  : OnlineOCR.net is a free web-based Optical Character Recognitionsoftware (OCR) that allows you to convert scanned PDF documents (including multipage files), faxes, photographs or digital camera captured images into editable and searchable electronic documents including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Rtf, Html and Txt. Converted documents look exactly like the original – tables, columns, bullets and graphics.

9) Free OCR  : Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. You can use this service to extract text from any image you supply. This service is free, no registration necessary. Just upload your image files. Free-OCR takes either a JPG, GIF, TIFF BMP or PDF (only first page). The only restriction is that the images must not be larger than 2MB, no wider or higher than 5000 pixels and there is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour.

As per Wikipedia , OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the mechanical or electronic conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.

So an OCR tool is for you to extract the text from an image. For example, the following is an image of the text "I Love You!" in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and French:

To get the text, you can write them down with these online virtual keyboards, instead, you can check out the following top 10 free online OCR tools:

1. ABBYY FineReader Online

After registration, you can upload an image or PDF file, select up to 3 languages, and choose an output format, then ABBYY FineReader Online  will convert your file to text.

2. Free OCR

On the Free OCR website, you can upload an image or PDF file (only first page), select the language, enter the CAPTCHA code, and click on the "Send file" button, then your file will be converted to text.

3. Free Online OCR

Free Online OCR  only supports English, you can upload a PDF or image file, and select an output format, then you can extract the text from the file.

4. Google Docs

Log in your Google Docs, select all the following 3 items:

• Convert Uploaded files to Google Docs format,
• Convert text from uploaded PDF and image files,
• Confirm setting before each upload.

And upload your image, select the language, then you can view the result.

5. i2OCR

On the i2OCR  website, you can upload your image or enter an image URL, and pick up a language, then you can preview and download the result.

6. New OCR

New OCR  is available for you to upload an image, PDF and even compressed file from your computer, or by entering its URL, then you can choose one language, click the "Preview" button to preview the file, and click the "OCR" button todownload the result.

7. OCR Convert

On the OCR Convert  website, you can upload an image or PDF file, select a language, and click the "Process" button, then you can convert and download the result as a TXT file.

8. OCR Online

After registration, you can choose a language, select an output format, and upload an image or PDF file, then you can covert your file to text.

By the way, OCR Online  is only available for you to upload 5 pages (images) per week free.

9. OCRextrACT

On the OCRextrACT  website, you can select a language, and upload a PDF or image file, then you can view the result on the website or download it as a TXT file.

10. Online OCR

On the Online OCR  website, you can upload an image, choose one language, select the output format, enter the verified code, and click the "Recognize" button, then you can preview and download the result.

For the differences on supported languages, input and output formats among the above 10 OCR tools, you can check out the following table:

s, none of them can convert the image of text in 5 different languages, and what is more, they are not good enough to recognize the handwritten text yet.