Free OCR Software for Windows 8.1/10

Welcome to the official home_page_ for the (a9t9) Free OCR Software. As the name suggests, the purpose of this app is to extract text from image files and PDF documents. The OCR app runs on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 as Windows store app or as OCR.SPACE web app in your browser.

Download and install from the (a9t9) Free OCR Software Windows store page.
Using XP, Win7, Mac or Linux? Then use the companion Online OCR Web service. Upload your document and convert it to text right in your browser, nothing to install.

TFree and open-source OCR application for the Windows Store. The application includes support for reading and OCR'ing PDF files.

Why use a9t9) Free OCR Software for Windows Store?

The application is simple to install/uninstall, and very easy to use
Free to use
100% adware and spyware free
Very good text recognition rate
You can improve and customize it - it is open source (GPL)

If you have not done it yet, install it or try it in your web browser.

The free OCR software has a very good, professional-level, text recognition rate. In this screenshot, a smartphone image of a Chinese article is recognized with almost no errors.

How to get started:

You can open an image or PDF file. The content of the source file will be displayed in the left window. If your document has more than one page, or if you opened multi-page documents, use the arrows at the midde of the page to navigate between them,

You start the OCR by clicking the Start Ocr button, and you will see the result in the right window. Output text can be saved as a text file or Word document.

Supported OCR input images

All text in the image should have normal orientation with all lines written in the same direction. but the OCR engine can correct rotation up to ±40 degrees. The OCR software supports image dimensions of from 40 by 40 pixels to 2600 by 2600 pixels.

The accuracy of text recognition depends on the quality of the image. An inaccurate reading may be caused by the following:

Blurry images
Handwritten or cursive text
Artistic font styles
Small text size (less than 15 pixels for Western languages, or less than 20 pixels for East Asian languages)
Complex backgrounds
Shadows or glare over text
Perspective distortion
Oversized or dropped capital letters at the beginnings of words
Subscript, superscript, or strikethrough text

Supported languages

There are 21 supported languages. Based on recognition accuracy and performance, supported languages are divided into three groups:

Excellent: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
Very good: Chinese Simplified, Greek, Japanese, Russian and Turkish.
Good: Chinese Traditional and Korean (Why Asian language OCR is difficult).

The language is required information for correct text recognition, so it must be specified in advance with the “OCR Language” drop-down.

For software developers and geeks

The (a9t9) Free OCR Software for Windows Store tool is a graphical user interface front-end (GUI) for the new Microsoft OCR library. This free OCR library for Windows Runtime has been released as a NuGet package. The free OCR software itself is written in C#/WPF and the full source code is available as ready-to-compile Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 project on GitHub under the GPL V2 open source license.

Note: Do you need a version of this tool with a OCR command line interface? Please see the OCR command line examples that use our new and free OCR web api (same powerful OCR engine). You can use the API to automate OCR tasks.