gImageReader

gImageReader: Easily extract text from images and PDF files with this useful application

gImageReader is a free, lightweight utility that lets you open images and PDF documents and extract text from the selected area. The application was designed to be a friendly and clean GTK frontend to tesseract-ocr.

You can use files stored in your PC, clipboard, aquired from scanner as well as screenshots. It automatically detects the page layout, plus you can manually define and tweak recognition areas.

The program even comes with support for multipage PDF files and the recognised text is shown next to the image. Users are offered basic editing tools for the output text, including the abilities to remove line breaks and a search/replace function.

There’s also a spellchecking function, altough it works only if the related dictionary is installed.