"If you use Linux, or another free operating system, and need optical character recognition (OCR) software, be prepared for a challenge. OCR is a tricky problem on any computing platform--both because it is conceptually hard, and because the task does not lend itself to simple, easy-to-use interfaces.
"OCR is the use of visual pattern matching to extract text from an image--usually a scanned paper document, but it could be a digital photo, a frame of video, or a screenshot just as easily..."
