How to extract text from an image or PDF

Extraction of text from an image or PDF file is made possible by Optical Character Recognition technology. Suppose you have a PDF book or some scanned images of text documents and you want to get the text from those images in notepad or any other text editor, then what will you do? We all know that we can't copy text directly from any image. So, here we'll use the OCR technology.  I'm going to tell you about some free tools that can extract text from your image files.

FreeOCR : A freeware to extract text from images

This tool is a freeware which uses Tesseract OCR Engine to extract text from an image or a pdf file. You can install it in your computer easily using its setup file. This tool supports common image formats and multipage tif format images. You can download it from this link.

SimpleOCR : Another freeware to extract text from images

This is is a lightweight tool which supports TWAIN scanning, it means you can scan your documents directly in it and can extract the text from the scanned image. It can detect bold, italic and underlined text easily so that you get your text document with high accuracy as compared with the scanned document. You can download this appfrom here.