Free online OCR

I haven’t managed to go paperless yet, but I do try to keep as little paper around as I can. I scan a lot of things to PDF and save them in Google Documents. Whenever I do that, I like to have the text in the documents searchable. If all I do is scan a page, and the image becomes the PDF, then there is no text to search. However, if you use Optical Character Recognition (OCR), you can turn the picture into text.  This is also very handy when you do not want to have to retype something entirely.

There is a web site at http://www.free-ocr.com/ that lets you upload an image, and it will find the text for you. This doesn’t really help with PDFs (as you aren’t actually putting the text back in the PDF), but if you are looking to avoid retyping something, this is a good place to start.

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