OCR is short for optical character recognition. This is when a computer scans in the image of a document, either hand-written, typed, or a computer print out, and then converts the image into a text document. There aren't many free OCR options out there that are any good.

But there's a new player in this field. Google. And as they have almost unlimited resources to throw at problems like this, chances are their solution will be one of the best out there... and free. You can now use Google Docs to scan in images, convert them with the OCR functionality, and then have a text document of the results. You can read about it on the Google blog: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-docs-ocr.html.