@#12 Sgo Thanks for this. I googled for ABBY FineReader 5.0 Pro free and found a link that works. They ask for an email address but they don't use it; they just respond by displaying the serial number on the website. They also offer a "full" installation with dozens of languages if you need more than English.

I start the program and register it. I'm told registration successful and to restart the program. I do and it says unregistered at the top!

Previous version was 4, date was 3rd April, 2012.

I disagree giovanni we all know how to get a ferarri for free its just not legal, so its nice to know which is best so we dont go and take a fiat instead

or like some of us, we simply can't afford these software at all.
so giveawayoftheday.com is a godsend.

Installed okay (Windows 7 Pro Machine) and tells me registration was successful and to restart program, but on restart it opens up as unregistered program and tells me I can only convert 3 pages before registering. Loop-d-loop, same results over and over again.
Will uninstall.

Hi, I installed program and tried to convert scanned pdf file with bulgarian text. It started OCR and that was endless process - I stopped the program. May it is useless for other languages except "base"?

#23 Giovanni
My first introduction to ABBYY OCR was when it came free with a printer.
Please note the word FREE in the above sentence, as per my first comment.
This came with a Dell/Lexmark printer which many GAOD will probably own, or if not can be obtained very cheaply when used.

From reading the useful comments of Ashraf and XP man and some others, I decided not to try today's giveaway, as it seems to be pretty unreliable. However, I will not vote for it since I did not download it.

#23 Giovanni - For a long time, I've tried hard to be quiet about your attitude, but today this is it! Why is it that every time somewhat disagrees with you, you either become vindictive or snobs that person? I seem to recall that you too from time to time mention apps that are not free at all. Get off the pedestal you put yourself on, and stop being so vain and arrogant. And by the way that "dude" thing is annoying. You may think it is cool but it is not. It is simply immature. I guess you have no idea what a "dude ranch" is.

Let's tell the whole story about ABBYY products! Their premier product FineReader IS $170. However, Transformer is $60 and does convert scanned documents to PDF and then, if you choose, to DOC. I compared the results from Transformer to Nitro Pro which I use extensively. The results were similar on a very old document which was probably produced on some old technology called a typewriter. Transformer has been offered FREE lately which is the only reason I picked it up since I already have Nitro.

Not bad. It's not ABBYY, but nothing is ABBYY. (I have Fine Reader).
Everyone else is playing catchup; including Adobe, when it comes to OCR.

This performs reasonably well on standard text documents and magazines. First two attempts. Some not-so-minor issues with layouts that include images with contrasts in them; such as a picture of a cover or a photo of a sign.

Otherwise; for a $50 program, it holds its own as well as any other in this price range.

Considering Abbyy Fine Reader has an MSRP of $170...!

Just tried it out. Limited value. Might be able to work with word documents with little or no formatting beyond the basics. If there's any complicated formatting such as columns forget it. If you really want Adobe but don't want to pay hundreds of dollars get Nitro Pro. I've seen the latest version on sale for about $125. Unless you need to embed multimedia files in a pdf document, it'll do everything Acrobat does.

# XP MAN

You didn't upset me at all....actually you made me laugh!!

Come on...you can't compare a tool like this GAOTD Worth 50 bucks with another one whose price is 170 $ and then recommend people here to buy it without mentioning its price.

It's like saying: this small car offered for FREE today is not enough for me...if you grab a FERRARI ($$$$$$$$$$) all problems are gone...LOL!

Maybe you still didn't realized it, but 99% of GAOTD readers are just home users who are here because can get good software for FREE and don't like paying money for any shareware at all, especially if a program costs 170 bucks like the ABBYY one.

So what's the point of recommending expensive software like ABBY OCR software? At least mention its price next time!

For quite a few years I'm running after an apps. that can handle my documents: scanned and emailed! I found that some apps convert nicely scanned but cannot handle scanned and emailed. Don't really know the technical difference but I do need an apps. that can handle emailed PDF's as I get them from overseas and there's no way to get the scanned docs directly. Will report later after testing this one if it's OCR section will help me dissipate my suspicion about this new apps.

Thanks to PDFZilla + GOTD.
Tested it.
Result: Good enough for me.
Not too bad actually.
There are some errors, of course.

Lousy part: Unchangeable output folder is to c:\PDFOCR_Output\

I have two versions of ABBYY, given to me free when I bought 2 different pieces of hardware. There were part of the bundles. Yes, ABBYY is pretty good.

Just to share with others, my technique for PDFs that you cannot copy/paste from:

I use PDFTools, a freeware product that does the following to PDFs:
Encrypts & Decrypts PDFs
Joins and Splits PDFs
Stamps PDFs
Rearranges PDFs
Creates PDFs from other document sources

I primarily use this for the PDFs I need to copy/paste FROM.
I open the PDFTools, select the SPLIT function, enter the SPLIT RANGE PAGE(s), CLOSE the original PDF; open the new PDF and then you can copy paste from the new split PDF. I subscribe to several electronic magazines that LOCK their PDFs when I get them and this tool allows me to do whatever I want to them, specifically so that I can copy/paste patterns (knit and crochet) to Word document so I can FORMAT them in order to actually make the item in the pattern.

Phenomenal tool!

GET IT HERE:
http://www.sheelapps.com/

It took me more time to reformat the converted text, spell check it and re-arrange the empty space left from the conversion than if I just re-typed it manually. And then, when I converted back to PDF, I got totally different layout.
Just uninstalled it, to much hustle to bother with it.

#13 Giovanni
Sometimes if a job needs doing properly you have to pay, today I pointed out a program that does its job exceptionally well.
I did it in the hope that it would help people from wasting their money on programs that performs badly.
This appears to have upset you and for the life of me I cannot understand why.

Installed and registered on Win XP SP3 with no problems. I was wholly unimpressed by the default installation location of C:\pdfOCR though. OK, I could (and did) change it, but it is not what I regard as an acceptable default. Similarly it saves the scanned text to C:\PDFOCR_Output and not to anywhere in the My Documents hierarchy, which makes a mockery of my set-up where My Documents is mapped to another drive and C: is reserved for operating system and applications software only. I expected to be asked where to file the scan, not to be told where it has been put.

Now on to how it worked. I receive scanned letters sometimes which I later need to quote from, so this looked like a very useful tool, using the OCR function to save me retyping. (The scanned images to PDF was not important because I already have a print to PDF utility which I am happy with.)

So I have only trialled the OCR function and it has some real weaknesses. Horizontal lines above text result in the text below it being recorded as total garbage, and obliques in reference numbers all become upper case I, and it really struggles with references which are a mix of alpha and numeric. Nevertheless, the ordinary text of a letter was captured with easily spotted and easily corrected errors, so for what I want it for, extracting sections of text to embed as quotes in a document of my own, it is good enough as a giveaway.

If I had paid the quoted price for it though, I would be a very disappointed customer. My test file was a nice clear image, and I expect much greater accuracy from a paid-for product when the input is that good.

For a frontend to free Tesseract engine it's quite costly. Some people try to harvest from other people's seed. Unfortunately this software is not the only one.

By the way a Readiris variant (restricted to scanned text) I got with a Kodak scanner-printer got quite good results i.e. only a few corrections needed. Unfortunately I can't compare it to ABBY as my version is quite outdated and two updates of good software sum up to the price of the latest versions.

As I don't need it often ...

But I've got a good advice for all those who hate to empty their printer cartridges just because the background of a PDF is fully coloured.

Former comment I didn't succeed to transfer to GOTD:

My only reason for converting PDFs to doc etc. has been for editing, e.g. to erase coloured background before printing which costs up to 60 times more ink (3 colours!) than pure black on white and thus emptying your cartridges in a hurry.

If it's the same for you, Adobe Acrobat can print black on white, too, but is too costly. But there is free PDF-XChange Viewer (portable). Goto Edit, Preferences, Accessibility and select "Override Document Colours" and then "Use Custom Colour Scheme". After changing colour to your wishes (Line Art? Fill Colour?): "Apply". By the way there is a predefined colour scheme for black and white, too.

Working effectively I have "installed" portable variant twice to allow a quick comparison of author's PDF and black and white.

PDF-XChange Viewer OCR + portable (multilanguage):
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/downloads

This program does not accommodate non-text input (i.e., pictures, tables, etc.), and seems to have about a 10% error rate on even good, solid plain text. This is barely acceptable, or not acceptable, for anyone with long documents in scanned form, since the output will have to be tediously error-corrected by hand, by comparing the original with the OCR’d output. It might be acceptable for use with short documents.

The best programs I have found for converting scanned images/PDF files to formatted output -- with tables, images, and text formatting retained in excellent form -- are Aiseesoft PDF to Word Converter and ABBYY PDF Transformer. Though neither of these is free, I was able to snag these as giveaways, so they may come around again. If they do, be sure to get them.

# XP MAN

Sure ABBYY OCR software is far better than this GAOTD, but how much does it cost?

90% of the time, I need to convert a PDF form such as a job application etc.. When doing those type of conversions, the rendering must be at least 99% accurate or it looks like child's play. This program is not up to that work yet.

Recently ABBYY offered Finereader5 as a giveaway (shrinked to English OCR only). Maybe still?

It is only useful if you have an image with a text in pdf (a document generated from a scanned text image).
Regular pdf can have the text easily extracted, as well their images, and a software like this is normally not necessary.
The conversion quality was poor.
Minimal of 15% of errors in all tests I made.
So, 40 bucks to something I will use once a year is too much.
As it is free today, OK, I can install, test and use.
So, thanks GAOTD!

comment:
agree with #4 xp-man
I recently tested many OCR programs on some scanned, type-written documents, and discovered the same thing: ABBYY is in a class by itself. I have not tested today's offering and don't intend to. I post this comment for people [like me] who use the gaotd comments to discover high quality (and possibly free :) software when they need to get work done.
as always, kudos to gaotd, ashraf, and giovanni

Another good one is this:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Free-Image-OCR.shtml

Just pay attention while installing it since it's an AD supported app!!

Thanks GOTD for this giveaway. Here is a review & How-To tutorial on how to use PDF OCR software here http://goo.gl/tXk0WZ

Installed easy on Win 7 without having to run as admin as by #3-Naveen. Tested only the PDF-TO-TEXT functionality because this is usually harder to obtain than the Text-to-PDF functionality. A clean PDF to text converts easily to text but consistently, the last three lines have errors for eg. "info@XXXX-group.com" converts to "infolrnXXXX-gr0up.o0m". Also the lower case letter "i"converts to an "r" or a "1". Regretably, the description does not indicate compatibility with Win 8,but double-clicking the installer gives a "Windows cannot complete the extraction. The destination file could not be created". However the installer still runs and installation is lean and quick. In both cases, the offer to install Software Informer is there but please ignore it and select Purchase PDF OCR instead and copy paste the code provided with the downloaded .txt file. Results in Win 8 are, however, worse than in Win 7, but that might be the reason Win 8 is not included in the stated System requirements.Overall impression? Useful for single page conversions where one would be pre-disposed to make the corrections manually. For more than a single page, methinks it would be faster and more accurate to just copy the PDF content to an editor like MS Office or Notepad++ if it is a true PDF. In both instances, the same PDF document converted to an image file and back to PDF gave garbage as the converted output.

Prime Time? Not for me. Fortunately, because of the lean and quick installation, the un-installation was even smoother. Nuff Said.

No bad...easy to use GUI, can edit the OCR results with a built-in text editor, thus enabling you to edit scanned PDF files without using Word

It also gives you the option to convert one single page, a range of pages, or the entire PDF file in batch mode (supports even the Italian Language....woh, simply unbelievable...LOL!!)

As for conversion quality, I found it pretty GOOD with regard to TEXT only...not so good when required to extract text from images.

But if you want a better and more professional OCR product (for instance an ABBYY OCR software) you have to pay more, of course!!!

THUMBS UP from me!

BEST FREE ALTERNATIVES

http://www.ocronline.com (==> Supports over 153 languages)
http://www.paperfile.net (==> It also uses the powerful Tesseract engine by Google like this GAOTD)
http://capture2text.sourceforge.net

And to create a PDF file directly from scanned documents and images for FREE:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/Free-Scan-to-PDF.shtml
http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/WinScan2PDF

Enjoy!

In the first OCR program I used you had to draw in every letter in a grid, this had to be done for all size fonts, and types, that is bold and italic and it took days just for one font, and it still was useless!.
Fortunately, we have moved on since then but not too far according to my test on today's download.
It made a complete hash of an image from a car auto manual that had been scanned.
Recently, I've been testing OCR programs including OmniPage, and non-have fared well except ABBYY which quite frankly is in a class of its own.
I used it on the same page that I tested today's download on and even though the image was a rather washed out looking page it was just short of perfect.
My first introduction to ABBYY OCR was when it came free with a printer.
It is so good that I found the best way of converting many PDF documents is to convert them to an image and then use it.
Recently, I found Ashraf’s recommendation UniPDF, to be by far the best converter of non-image PDF files.
If you need to convert PDF files, normal and image, use UniPDF and ABBYY and you have all the bases covered.
Frankly, today's download is comparatively is a waste of disk space.

Those people who are having trouble installing this program, extract the files in any folder and then run the setup.exe "As Administrator".
The setup will begin normally.

Very good at pdf to doc, but will not register1

Is this a new name for PDFZilla v3, which was made available here back in July? If so, does installing PDF OCR 4.3.1 replace or update that version...or should the old one be uninstalled first...or do both co-exist and do different things without affecting each other?

Pros
*Allows you to extract text from PDF files — quickly converts text in a PDF document into an editable text document
*Intuitive interface that is simple for almost everyone to figure out
*Can be used as a standard PDF viewer (although we don't recommend it)

Cons
*Hit-or-miss conversion quality

Free Alternatives
gImageReader (not specific to PDFs but an OCR program nonetheless)

Final Verdict
Click here for final verdict and full review