Do you need to use the text in an image of any letter or newspaper or some document? Optical character recognition (OCR) tools can be used to convert the text in some image (JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF or PDF) format into word/text. But not everyone has an OCR application. That's where free online OCR tools come to rescue.

There are plenty of good online tools that will read the text in images and give you the output in word format that you can copy and paste to desired place. This involves simple process of uploading the image on the website and then copy-pasting the resultant text. However, it's recommended to go through the text once because the results are not error-free. Some letters or words can be wrongly identified, changing the meaning of the text.

1. Online OCR: This supports all image formats as well as PDF (only the first page of a multi-page document). The text churned out by the OCR tool removes line breaks (not paragraphs), thus saving you the hassle of removing the unwanted line breaks when using the text in some document.

2. Free OCR: Free Online OCR is another tool for converting image to text. It supports only JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP and PDF formats. It retains the line breaks in results, which can be a cause for irritation.

3. New OCR: New OCR supports all image formats as well as multi-page PDF documents. If you need to convert any PDF to word text, upload the file and then get page-wise results. It supports multiple languages.

These three online OCR tools should be good enough to meet your most requirements. If you know any better tool, do let me know.