tesseract Tesseract is a free software optical character recognition engine for various operating systems. Originally developed as proprietary software at Hewlett-Packard between 1985 and 1995, it had very little work done on it in the following decade. It was then released as open source in 2005 by Hewlett Packard and UNLV. Tesseract development has been sponsored by Google since 2006. It is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Tesseract is considered one of the most accurate free software OCR engines currently available. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Tesseract) 1 2 0.1 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/sites/all/datacharts/hc/16022-chart-wp.html