free OCR software for scanners

[major kong]

Someone has given me a Hp psc 750 and it's working great as a printer BUT
scanning in photo's and documents is a different story. The bundled software
with it from HP is staggeringly bad. It's now intuative at all. I'd like to
uninstall it completely and load up software that would allow me to EASILY
scan in a photo and have it appear at the same size as the one in the
scanner bed, scan in handwriting and machine documents and convert them to
text. I'd like the product to be free, wouldn't everyone, but I don't mind
paying for something that works. Anyone got any suggestions please?

 

[Surfer!]

Someone has given me a Hp psc 750 and it's working great as a printer BUT
scanning in photo's and documents is a different story. The bundled software
with it from HP is staggeringly bad. It's now intuative at all. I'd like to
uninstall it completely and load up software that would allow me to EASILY
scan in a photo and have it appear at the same size as the one in the
scanner bed, scan in handwriting and machine documents and convert them to
text. I'd like the product to be free, wouldn't everyone, but I don't mind
paying for something that works. Anyone got any suggestions please?

What does 'appear at the same size' mean? You are taking one kind of
medium and turning it into another. To do this, it is sampled into lots
and lots of dots - pixels - and you are facing the problem that the
pixels are handled differently on screen and by the printer. To get the
same size image requires you have some understanding of this.

To be able to scan text and have it dropped into a document needs OCR.
The original bundle with the printer probably included it, but I imagine
whoever gave it to you managed to forget that CD.

Converting handwriting to text is another and much more complicated
matter. I have no idea how you would go about doing it. Microsoft
OneNote is meant to be able to do that but only if the handwriting was
created on a Tablet PC, so I haven't tried with my copy. Like voice
recognition it will certainly involve training the converter. I doubt
very much there was any in the original bundle with the HP.