Capture image and convert it to text

I was not really sure how to name the title of this article. Jocr is a freeware that makes it possible to capture to capture a set region, a window or a full screen image in Windows and use character recognition to write the text of the image into a notepad file. The only prerequisite as far as I can tell is - unfortunately - a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 or newer with Microsoft Office Document Imaging installed which you can find under the Office Tools tab of the installation CD. The language that you are using has to be supported by Microsoft Office Document Imaging, about 20 are supported next to English of course.

Using Jocr is actually a pretty straightforward process. Choose if you want to capture a region, window or desktop and use the mouse to draw the region or to highlight a window that should be captured. It is not necessary to select something if you choose to capture the whole desktop of course. A preview of the captured image will be shown in Jocr and all that is left to be done is to click on recognize to start the character recognition.

Results are actually pretty good. They are not perfect however and you need to manually edit them for errors but the recognition rate is astounding for a freeware. The main use that I can foresee for this software would be to capture text from files that can not be copied and use Jocr to have an editable version of the text.