Gttext is a free open source program for the Windows operating system to identify text in images and copy it to the Windows clipboard. The Ground Truthing tool for Color Images with Text needs to be installed before it can be used to copy text from images to the clipboard.

The program supports a variety of image formats including the popular jpg and png formats as well as bmp, tiff and gif. You start by loading an image into the program. One issue that I had was with the available file filter in the browser, as it offered separate filters for all image formats so that it was necessary to switch to the right filter before the image file would appear in the file browser.

All you then need to do in best case is to draw a rectangle around the text on the image that you want to copy. The program displays the copied text that it identified automatically in a popup with options to cancel, try again or to continue (copy to clipboard).

Try again will run the text recognition again to correct possible errors that were made in a previous run. The text recognition software supports various tools to optimize the image for identifying text. This includes zooming in or out, or modifying the documents brightness among other tools.

Another interesting feature is the ability to extract all text at once without selecting the text first. This is done with a click on Tools > Copy Text From > Full Image.

The text recognition algorithm of Gttext is solid, and worked very well on several document scans that I had in image format on my PC. You do need to go over the results though as they may contain errors that you need to correct manually.

Windows users can download Gttext from the project’s Google Code project website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

TOP OCR processes images of documents that have either been taken by scanners, digital cameras or smartphones. It basically allows to emulate the usual document scanning that is done by a hardware scanner with images taken by digital cameras instead.

The software ocr application will process images that get loaded into the software program by the user of the computer system. It will display the scanned document in the left window and the text that has been processed by the OCR document scanning in the right window. The software developers of the OCR software are recommending at least a 3 Megapixel camera to take the image of the document. They have setup a tutorial page with many helpful tips on getting the best results.

The OCR document scanning process itself takes only a few seconds per page. Results are instantly shown in the right window which offers basic text editing capabilities to correct any errors in the automatic text recognition process.

The OCR part of the software program is providing basic image manipulation features like rotating the scanned images or changing the image contrast. TOP OCR is a multi-lingual OCR software program for the Windows operating system that produces impressive results if the source image is of good quality.