9 Best Free and Open Source OCR Screen Capture Tools

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the conversion of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into searchable, editable documents. OCR software is able to recognise the difference between characters and images, and between characters themselves.

This article highlights OCR powered screen-capture tools to capture information instead of images. We only feature open source software here.

Here’s our verdict of the tools succinctly summarized in a LinuxLinks styled ratings chart.

The tools features in this article perform text recognition offline using the respected OCR framework Tesseract. For general OCR tools, please check out this roundup.

Let’s explore the 9 OCR screen capture tools at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources.

This article has been updated to reflect the changes outlined in our recent announcement.

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