For a long time there was this distinction that OCR meant "typefaces as in a scanned document" whereas if you wanted more "free form text recognition" you'd lea

For a long time there was this distinction that OCR meant "typefaces as in a scanned document" whereas if you wanted more "free form text recognition" you'd lean yourself towards some machine learning based approach (SVM, convnets, etc). Now, this is an artificial divide: there's nothing in the defintion of what OCR is that means "oh it only works on scanned documents". It's just what it used to mean back in the day. Still, if that's your kind of problem, you may look into something more along the lines of a deep convnet to do character detection and then recognize each bounding box into an alphabet.