Scan your old poetry and more

OCR or Optical Character Recognition is an advanced software technique that allows a computer to extract text from images. In the early days, OCR software was quite crude and unreliable. Now, with the vast amount of computing power available, it is often the fastest way to convert text in an image into something you can edit with a word processor.

These ten applications offer different approaches to the task of OCR, without a price tag and across multiple platforms. If you’re looking for a way to turn images into words, you’ll almost certainly find the best free OCR software you need below.

FreeOCR is a free basic OCR software that offers all the core functionality you would want from this type of software. For starters, if you have a TWAIN scanner (which is basically all scanners), you can scan and extract text directly from paper. Importing images also works as you would expect. This includes multi-page documents in TIFF and PDF formats.