I know that it’s quite a long time that those posts are here but I found them while looking for a free online ocr solution in Java, and I would like to share the FREE answer I have created.
I browsed lots of posts while searching for OCR in Java, and all was linking to Asprise / javaocr, but those are unaffordable for non-commercial project.
quite agree with you, I prefer free ocr tools, and there are many in google search, and tesseract ocr is also a good one.