FreeOCR.net is a list of totally free OCR (Optical character recognition) software packages available to download .
FreeOCR is a Windows OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine. It includes a Windows installer and It is very simple to use and supports multi-page tiff's, fax documents as well as most image types including compressed Tiff's which the Tesseract engine on its own cannot read .It now has Twain scanning. It can also open PDF's Free OCR uses the Tesseract OCR engine (see below)
AbleWord AbleWord can import PDF's and extract text and even convert to Word document format. It also serves as a very usefull PDF editor, highly recommended