Limited but free
GOOGLE HAS updated and released the Tesseract OCR software under an Open Sauce licence.
In its day, Tesseract, which was developed by maker of printer ink HP in the 1980s-90s, was the dog's of OCRs. In 1995 it was ranked as one of the top three OCR performers.
However, HP lost interest in the technology, and it has apparently been gathering dust in some warehouse ever since. HP decided to Open Sauce it and offered it to the Information Science Research Institute at UNLV to do something with. UNLV turned the software over to Google to update so that it was stable enough to open sauce.
The program has limitations. It only supports English, can't do multi-column material, or grayscale and colour documents. It is also not as accurate as the best commercial OCR packages out there.
However it does have some advantages. Firstly, it's free, and secondly it's a hell of a lot better than any other open source OCR package.
Google says that it wants to hire some OCR engineers to help develop the project further. More
here.
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