For those with scanned documents that would be more useful in editable form, Online OCR offers a free, high-quality solution. Users can simply upload an image (JPG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, GIF, and non-editable PDF are all accepted), then choose the language and preferred output format. At the free level, the service will convert 14 images per hour, but those who are satisfied with the service and...

Reading the First Books: Multilingual, Early-Modern OCR for Primeros Libros was a "two-year, multi-university effort to develop tools for the automatic transcription of early modern printed books." This project used an optical character recognition (OCR) tool called Ocular to transcribe texts from the Primeros Libros de las Americas (First Books of the Americas) collection, which is an impressive...