The OCR is a technology with the help of which the information that is written or typed is transformed into digital data. The optical character recognition system allows the images of a handwritten page to be transformed into a text that can be edited.
For example, you can take a scanner and scan a typed text. That becomes a digital photo. After that, by using an optical character program the text is “grabbed” and transformed into digital editable data that you can modify with Notepad, Microsoft Word etc.
For those who want complete information, the software takes the text and than translates it into ASCII or Unicode. The Unicode standard allows the texts and the symbols that are written in different world systems to be manipulated by the computers in a unitary way. The ASCII is an American code standard used for information exchange. It means character encoding in the English alphabet. In conclusion, the optical character recognition programs allow the text to be recognized by all the computers around the world.
Having software like this is not hard at all and it is quite cheap. The systems that are very complex need a combination of software and also hardware.
But, there are some downsides also. Not all the characters can be recognized. Usually, if you are trying to work with a handwritten text, the software has a recognition rate of nearly 90%, if the writing is clean. If the text is cursive, the recognition rate is even lower because the cursive characters lack a bit of information.
Many free software solutions are. Some of them are the Simple OCR and also the OCRAD. But if you want to pay for a more complex one, the price is usually around 100 dollars. One of the programs at this price is Abbyy (- http://www.abbyy.com).