This generally comes with your scanner.  It will be a light edition but there are no restraints.
Wocar sounds like it fits the bill - http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_1968.html

I'll agree here with slink9, thinking you are likely to get less headaches if you go with the mfr. But I highly recommend going here for a visit:

http://www.scansoft.com/

(a) They are more likely to address issues for leading edge technologies and compatibilies, what to look for as "compliance" and "standards" for any product you use, freeware or otherwise, so you can better check out features before committing too much

(a2) They've been around awhile, so one can anticipate product support as the world changes. They grow, maybe merge with other companies, but seem true, or at least hold better to narrow definition of their business (eg OCR) than other companies

(b) I agree with you, they are more likely to either only do trialware (timeout) or provide freeware that only matches their own products

(c) I had read where they are supposed to have freeware like Adobe's Acrobat available. Meaning, if you send the document, the reader may not have to pay to read it. So their business model may be more like Adobe, making their money at the initial end of document creation, generation, and the kinds of conversions that may be involved, such as to MS-Word, including font selections. I had not taken time to check them further for features of any such freebies, but am interested, so if you do find out, do let me know. (Thanx in advance)

> It will be a light edition but there are no restraints

er, and often so light it is either for prior version of HW or OS or whether or not it will function well on one HW port vs another, and depending on the other HW and software installed.... yeah, I concur with 'light-weight' for sure. Definitely get mfr upgrade, but don't count on it to address more than one of those 'issues'.            ;-(

Well, it, the software, didn't come with my scanner.  

Purchased at auction and there was no software.  Auctioneer informed us of this before bidding started.  Windows 98 recognised it and dropped in a driver and it scans.  The HP site had more software and that gave me another better driver and some util software.

I'm playing with Wocar at the moment.  Did some searching after posting this question.  Wocar is like riding a bicycle with oval wheels.  Sometimes it gets you there and sometimes you fall off.

It likes wide text and not narrow text.  It's clumsy in operation and you can expect it to sometimes get stuck in a loop and sometimes fall over.  For straight text on a page it does the job, but don't give it any columns or tables or pictures to handle.

Well I now know where PaperPort, TextBridge, OmniPro and Dragon Dictate all ended up.  But at those prices I'll just sidestep elsewhere at the moment.

If no-one else comes up with anything else the points will be yours slink9.

You get what you pay for, generally.  I believe this is especially true in the somewhat underpopulated OCR area along with quite a few other low volume areas.
One BIG exception is my Booking Agent software.  It is $275 while other competitive products start at $129 for 20 users and go upwards of $400 for 200 or more users.  They also charge extra per email customer you have.  Mine is a flat $275 and the email is there and available if you have Outlook.
Maybe I should look into writing a decent OCR program.  Could it be written in Visual Foxpro 7?  I guess not - scratch that idea.

You may also want to look around www.simtel.net for OCR software.  They have some free stuff but mostly shareware.

I'll leave the system as it as the moment.

WOCAR can stay there at present as long as I only have to do light scanning.  

If I have to do serious scanning I'll investigate and look for some good reviews on OCR systems out there before buying.

Another program to try is SimpleOCR at http://www.simpleocr.com - it is a freeware program based on the WOCAR engine.  It claims to be able to work with any TWAIN compliant scanner.

I tried Textbridge Pro 11 for use with contracts in our office. Simple idea it seemed. Scan a blank contract, fill in the blanks and be done. Wrong!! TB Pro 11 could not keep the graphics on the borders straight at amy setting. It kept outputting to Word with the graphics sliced and diced up in one corner of the document and the text in a sort of random order and font type on the page.

Sent the test contract to Scansoft. They tried for 3 weeks to get it to work. Fianally recommended that I spend another $200.00 for OmniPage Pro as it had a "better" engine. Spent the money like an idiot and got the same results again.

Only decent thing to happen was Scansoft prevailing on the dealer to do a refund after they couldn't fix the problem with either package.

Maybe you should just redesign the contract to make it easier to work with.

I was trying to keep my comment brief but you are absolutely right. We tried a simple b&W form and still got different fonts and page alignments than what we started with. Scansoft did try to make it work but they never got anywhere. It has been a puzzler for over a year now as TB 11 is what everyone recommends.

Do you have Office 2003? If you do, look no further. It comes bundled with an OCR software.
If you don't, I'm sorry, this is no answer. :)

The document imaging feature in Office 2003 works like a charm too!  Thanks Yasutaka - you've helped me out immensely

How good is Office 2003 OCR software compared to Abby fineprint or GOCR?

Have you tried www.downloads.com?

Just for the record...
http://www.simpleocr.com
offers an OCR program that is completely free of charge and works well.

Whoops, I didn't notice EZPutter's comment. Sorry.

Does anyone know how to use office 2003's built in ocr?
thanks