You're probably thinking of Tesseract. I've actually been doing some work with various OCR tools the past few days. Tesseract and Ocropus didn't work very well

You're probably thinking of Tesseract. I've actually been doing some work with various OCR tools the past few days. Tesseract and Ocropus didn't work very well for me, but I don't think mine is the intended use. I have a need to identify images that contain text (which could be on top of a complex background) and most OCR applications are better suited for reading scanned documents. So far GOCR has produced the best results for me. I found an article a couple weeks ago comparing a few OCR applications for scanning documents that someone might find interesting: http://www.linux.com/feature/138511 http://www.linux.com/feature/138511 OCR quality is heavily dependent on font type, font size and contrast, but for many typed documents Ocropus and Tesseract do a pretty decent job.