There are many occasions when you have an scanned image of a book / some text and you want to convert it into a text either to edit some part or to do some formatting.

This process is called Optical Character Recognition or OCR. Software can actually “read” the image and convert it into a text file for you. Getting a text file also makes it easy to search and to do copy – paste.

Here are some free online image to text convertors:

1. Convert using Google Docs – While uploading an image file Google Docs, check option “Convert text to Google Docs format” and Google Docs will automatically convert and save to your account Google Docs can do OCR on images and PDFs of size upto 2 MB. There is no limit as such on how many conversions you can do per day.

2. FreeOCR.com –The website does convert upto 10 images/PDFs per hour for you without the need of signing up.

3. OCR Online –OCR Online doesn’t require any registration/account creation. Upto 100 images can be converted to text in a day. It supports a large number of languages.

OCR Online has decent accuracy and keeps most of the original formatting intact. Another useful feature of this service is the batch processing facility.

OCR softwares are very good in recognizing printed / typed text. However, they are not very good in reading or deciphering hand writings.