JOCR itself is a portable software program. The interface looks like screen capturing software programs. It offers to capture a region, the desktop or the active window. The image will then be displayed in the program’s interface with options to print, copy or recognize.

Recognizing is obviously the main part as it will analyze the image at hand to recognize all the characters that it contains. The document imaging software will then display the recognized characters count and display them in the default text editor from where they can be edited or copied easily.

The document imaging software can be useful in situations where text has to be copied from interface elements. This can be error messages, text that is displayed in applications or images. The recognition rate depends largely on the type of image and text used. It ranges from brilliant (almost no editing required) to weak (failed to recognize certain characters, lots of editing required).

JOCR is compatible with the following languages: Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.

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.