SimpleOCR
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one of the most useful scanning features when it works. SimpleOCR works better than most free OCR apps I've tried previously, effectively scanning printed pages and converting them to text or Word documents with a very low margin of error. If you're a software developer, SimpleOCR is also available to license for inclusion in other applications without the royalties typically associated with OCR software bundling. A trial version of Charactell's Softwriting handwriting recognition software is also included, for scanning in your chicken scratch. While the handwriting recognition isn't as good as the stuff built into Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system, it also doesn't carry the price tag of needing a special computer to make it work either. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]