What is Reddit's opinion of FreeOCR?

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Not if you want to use the data. You will scan it and use OCR to convert the image to Text.

Then bring the text into Excel.

Here are links to a couple of OCR applications (I have used neither)

https://www.abbyy.com/en-ca/finereader/what-is-ocr/

http://www.paperfile.net/

Once converted to text, you will still have some cleanup to do, but it may be faster than manually typing everything.

If you don't already have one, buy a scanner with a document feeder, and then download a free OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software package like this one to turn scanned pages into text.

At the very least, it will save you the headache and time of transcription. OCR software is sometimes flaky, even going through it to edit for character-recognition mistakes will be faster than typing in the whole thing from scratch.

You can also easily cut your photos into separate pages (and automatically straighten them all) with a Python script. (imagemagick for the cutting, deskew for the auto straighting.) Would be free vs the $50 dollar software mentioned, and probably faster too.

I already have hacked together

• script that cuts a PDF into 4 equal parts (to print individual shipping labels using a label printer from a shipping service that only gives you a PDF with 4 lables per page)
• script that auto straightens all scans in a folder and converts them to individual PDFs (for our accountant. It also automatically opens Thunderbird and inserts address and body text..I only have to attach the files and hit send.)

Would probably be pretty easy to combine and slightly change these into a script that straightens and cuts all book photos into 2 equal parts, and merged them all into 1 PDF.

You'd only have to batch crop them first (record an action in Photoshop for 1, then apply to all others or you didn't move the book. Also great for levels to get the whites pure white, and the black black with the levels eyedropper.) Unless there's anything solution for that too. (Huh, looks like imagagick trim will try to detect borders and automatically crop. And it can do levels too )

The free OCR from http://www.paperfile.net or Calibre might work well enough to convert to text/ebook..

Happy to send what I have to whoever wants it, might even merge them myself and test it with some sheet music/normal book...

I've been using Acrobat to do everything in one piece of software, but FreeOCR looks pretty promising for a free solution. It's definitely helped a ton with getting the task done. Next to the slow scanner, naming files was taking the longest. Shoving everything in one file fixes that, but is useless if you can't find what you need after. Haven't had it set up like this long enough to know, but I'm curious to see if it'll actually work out faster to find things in one document than the individual files I've already scanned.

FreeOCR

-edit- Actually, I gave it some more thought and realized another option is just scan everything first, then get the 30 day trial of Acrobat to do the OCR. Also, trying to get another page or two on the stack when you've got nice uncrinkled pages that are less likely to jam adds up to less stacks. :) I've also just discovered how to make chapters in pdfs; searching in OneNote will no longer be needed.

The merge is simple - use either PDF Split & Merge (PDFSAM) or PDF Merge Tool. There are also free OCR programs out there, like FreeOCR, although I haven't tried them myself, as well as online tools to do the conversion.

You would need some sort of OCR software to recognize the characters and convert them. Foxit has one that's ok.

There's a bunch of free ones like this that may be worth a shot.

There are proprietary OCR programs (so payware).

The free ones seem to be all based on Tesseract. If you don't want to use the command line you can try something like Free OCR but it uses an older version of Tesseract.

You need to OCR them in order to make them searchable. Free ocr is not great. http://www.paperfile.net/

One option is to upload it to internet archive which will process it into a pdf and ocr it https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360001820212-How-to-upload-scanned-images-to-make-a-book

very easily... You should beable to use this... http://www.paperfile.net/

EDIT: Just hit file --> Open --> then click OCR, "start OCR process"

if that doesn't work try googling "Free OCR software" or something of the sort.
OCR = Object character recognition.

You are looking for something called OCR (optical character recognition) software. FreeOCR is pretty solid, but I didn't use it for anything too crazy. Hope that helps.

Yeah op, this here is the answer. I haven't ever used ocr, but it looks like scanning your pages as a pdf and running them through the program from here http://www.paperfile.net (disclaimer: I haven't tried it) will help you save a lot of time.

Okay, either you're lazy, or you have not installed Google at your office PC.. ;-)

Try this program, and see if it works.
I have not yet tried this myself (did try the other ones though).

FreeOCR

If that's not working, here's an alternative:

SimpleOCR

That's not working either? Well try this one then:

TopOCR

Can you start noticing the pattern?

Try to do a Google search for "Free OCR Software" and resist the temptation to click on the intrusive ads at the top of the search.
There are many different possibilities, and I'm sure one of them will work for you!

If you are really afraid you'll need something down the line (hint: you wont) grab a cheap scanner with document feeder https://houston.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=scanner&sort=rel and scan all documents you think you might need, maybe run them through http://www.paperfile.net/. Create a new seperate Dropbox account, upload all of the PDFs. Then toss the documents, sell the scanner again.