Tesseract is one option that worked great for me!
I used it as follows:
Install it, if you don't have it with:
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
Then:
Convert the .JPG scanned file to .tif (this is the format Tesseract
requires). This is done with ImageMagick as follows:
convert foo.JPG foo.tif
Now simply let Tesseract do it's magic:
tesseract foo.tif foo
(will save output to foo.txt)
I recently had to convert an old manual with multiple(36) pages to something digital. I whipped up a BASH script to do it.
Code here:
#!/bin/bash
# makeDoc.sh
# Turn a set of scanned JPG pages into a single document file.
# Requires the ImageMagick and Tesseract packages.
# Author: Fred Fury
echo "makeDoc.sh"
echo "Convert a set of scanned JPG pages into a single document file."
echo "Starting up..."
for i in {01..36}
do
echo "converting $i.JPG to $i.tif..."
bash -c "convert $i.JPG $i.tif" # Convert the file to tesseract usable format
bash -c "tesseract $i.tif $i &>-" # Convert the tif to txt
done
echo "Merging files into Output.doc"
bash -c "cat *.txt > Output.doc" # Merge all the generated txt files into a single file
echo "Done."
Also check out this page for some other solutions:
What's the best, simplest OCR solution?
This is where I found tesseract.
Hope that helps!