SimpleOCR is a proprietary optical character recognition

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 application developed originally by Cyril Cambien of France under the title WOCAR (until v2.5 in 2001). It converts black and white scans or TIFF images to editable text files or Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...

documents.

Version 3.1, reviewed in PC Magazine in 2004, is the current version . It can read documents in English and French, but cannot recognise accented characters used only in other languages .