OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, software is a class of programs that allow a computer to read symbols and other printed marks on a piece of paper. OCR software is always combined with scanner software as well as the scanner itself and is often considered to be the same thing as scanner software. Without OCR software, a scanner would not be able to recognize boundaries, letters, numbers, sketches, or other characters on a piece of paper. This article will list a number of OCR programs.

FreeOCR
FreeOCR combines the powerful results of the Tersseract OCR engine created by Google with its own Windows-based user interface. The software is easy to learn and use and supports several key components of OCR that are not generally found in scanner software. For instance, the software supports multi-page .tiff's, fax documents, and most image formats. FreeOCR also supports compressed .tiff's which Tersseract can not read by itself. FreeOCR also supports Twain scanning and will soon be able to process PDF files as well.

GOCR
GOCR is an open source OCR software under the GNU GPL license. The program can scan text from paper documents and convert it into digital text that can be used in any text editor such as Notepad, Word, or PDF. GOCR can also scan images and convert them to digital images as well. GOCR is also known as JOCR due to the fact that "gocr.sourceforge.com" was already taken when the company created their Sourceforge account.

SimpleOCR
SimpleOCR is a free OCR software that is used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. The software is able to work with the user's scanner to make digital representations of paper documents and convert them to real text so that the user does not have to retype their documents once scanned. SimpleOCR can also support various image types, fonts, layouts, and character options but some types of documents, such as those which are blurry, include multiple columns, or include non-standard fonts, may need one of SimpleOCR's other software packages in order to be properly read.

FreeKapture
FreeKapture is another free OCR software that is able to scan and print documents as well as copy and paste text and images to the Windows Clipboard. FreeKapture works with Twain scanning and is produced by the makers of MidWavi Pro. Images can be saved as JPG or BMP and the software includes a Help document as well as a Setup program that allows users to easily install and uninstall the software within seconds. Version 2 of FreeKapture, which is also free, can also save images as GIF and JPEG files.

OCR Desktop
OCR Desktop is a free desktop application designed for OCR and scanning technology. OCR Desktop allows the user to select either a whole document or a portion of a scanned document and convert the scanned text into ASCII text that can be used in any text editor, specifically Notepad. The software includes artificial intelligence, neural networks, and over 4 million font variations and though the registered version will remove popups and advertisements from the software, OCR Desktop is completely free.

TopOCR
TopOCR is a free OCR software specifically designed for mobile devices such as cameras, PDAs, and smartphones. TopOCR allows the user to take a picture of a business card, pamphlet, or any other document and extract the text from that picture so that it can be used for other applications. The software includes searchable PDF and HTML output formats and can read 11 different languages. TopOCR also includes a document layout analysis program, has a 99.8% accuracy rate, and has no page limit for "scanned" documents.