FreeOCR - the truly free OCR application for Windows

Recently I had a letter sent to me that was in French and it was a PDF but the text was not appearing as text (I could not select it as text) it was a graphic image. That's really a pain because I wanted to copy the text and paste it into Google Translator to double check what it was saying.

How to 'see' the text in the PDF if it's an image? We need to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. There are lots of options but I found a very simple, straightforward and free application (yes really, not a free trial but a truly free application!) called FreeOCR. It worked for me so I thought I'd give it a bit of airtime here.

It supports a number of different languages (you can see in the above screen shot), you can scan from a PDF or directly from a scanner. As you can see from the above, it's rather simple but I like that, it does what it is supposed to, that's sometimes all we need, isn't it?

You can find it here:
http://www.paperfile.net