Capture an image and convert it to text

I was not really sure how to name the title of this article. Jocr is a freeware that lets you capture part or all of your Windows screen, process the captured image afterwards using OCR to write all the text that it finds into a plain text document.

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 as of now.

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 you want to capture. 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 leftfor you to do 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 is to capture text from files that can not be copied and use Jocr so that you end up with text that you can copy or work with.

Update: Please note that Jocr has not been updated since 2006 which is a strong indicator that it has been abandoned by its author. While it may still work on some versions of Windows, it is likely that it may not be compatible with newer versions of the operating system.

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