How to apply OCR to JPG or PNG without printing it out & scanning it back in.

[hp7612]

We would like to apply OCR to a JPG or PNG without printing it out & scanning it back in.  We often receive electronic versions of documents we need to edit and it wastes paper, ink, and time to have to print them out and scan them in.  How can this be done directly with the OCR software?

[sabretooth04]

OCR can only be done on editable text. JPG and PNG are not editable.   You should scan them to a word document (or other) and then you can OCR the text.

[hp7612]

The response by sabretooth04 does not help.  

The goal is to take a jpg that is an image of text, apply an OCR routine to it and output editable text (with or without formatting).  This output could be a .txt file or .rtf file, or something editable by WORD, or NOTEPAD, or another word processor. 

HP 7612 has options to scan to PDF, JPG, or "editable text" via OCR.  There is no option to "scan to a word document" with .doc for the output file.  For "editable" the process appears to be 2-stage:  First a mechanical-optical processing.  Then after the user hits a button, some software processing.  I imagine the first process could be creating a JPG-like image of the physical document.  The second process could be sofstware OCR operations converting that into RTF. 

The people who send us JPGs do not have OCR capabilities and are not able to send RTFs instead.  Let me ask the question another way:  instead of feeding a piece of paper into the printer,  is there a way to feed a FILE into the HP software and get an RTF as output?

[sabretooth04 · Accepted solution]

Ah, now that you fully explain what you want....

Free OCR software is available on the web.  Try these two as they work great.

http://www.free-ocr.com/

http://www.ocrtoword.com/