Online OCR

OCR Web Service has a trial license period of 30 days. You can upload scans or other image-based text, and receive the content in a number of different formats, including ascii text.

Testing provided excellent results.

Here is a PDF showing a test. The second page shows the GIF of the original used in the process. Here is the Indesign package, including the GIF file of the document. Some errors occurred, revealing the danger of using OCR. At the same time, you could have made these same errors typing in the text.

The absolutely best OCR I have ever seen resides in Acrobat Professional. If you have Acrobat, don't even fool with any of this other stuff.

See also:

• ABBYY FineReader. Not as good as OnlineOCR. See here.
• OCR Terminal, untested.
• Free-OCR. The return text had extra linefeeds where the text wrapped. I had to run the copy through eCleaner to get rid of them. If you're unlucky enough to find yourself on a Mac, you can achieve the same result in Indesign by doing a find-and-replace: ^p^p replaced by ^p.
• Cometdocs, free online document converter. This free service includes an OCR function.
• OCROnline.
• Free Online OCR: performed well testing a jpg of a page at 300ppi.