I guarantee that at least once in your life you've had to manually type the text of a printed paper into a digital document, and I'm sure halfway through you cursed at your keyboard and wished you could just scan the page into an editable text document.

This week's tip: Convert Images to Editable Documents Using Free OCR Tools
http://www.techspot.com/guides/202-s...us-protection/

To be honest, I've never had a lot of success with OCR scanners. By the time you finish going through the document to edit out all the bad conversions, you could have re-typed the document anyway. BUT...what the heck - I run into this type of need very often so I'll give Google's new app a shot. Thanks for the heads up. Would have never known about this as Google - for all their innovation - really does a lousy job at promoting their own products.

Hi Tom, Julio, (et al)...
My initial experiences with OCR were similar to what Tom reports.
I still have some of those earlier programs on my shelf. (Don't ask me why!)
By the time Omnipage had reached version 12, they were doing great for my needs.
I have kept updating, even once since they were acquired by Nuance.
Very satisfied: It even does a decent job when the background is cluttered enough to confuse some other programs.
If there are now free tools that are doing as well as Omnipage at this task, that is good news!
Omnipage is not a "cheap" program.