How to get Google Desktop to index searchable pdf’s

if you're happy with the HP software for your scanner, you can download the Officejet and PSC Full Feature Software (364 MB) from the HP support website.

other than that, you can print to to PDF from ANY application with a PDF printer driver (e.g. CutePDF)

and here's a list of Free OCR Software Dowloads, take your pick :)

Here are some things that I found when researching this earlier this year. Sorry, I can't post more than one hyperlink due to my limited rating, so you'll have to Google for the links.

gscan2pdf

A really good GUI system that can use various OCR engines for the backend. This probably will meet your one-touch solution (and digitxp already mentioned it).

Tesseract OCR Engine

Can be used with gscan2pdf.

• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9676

Ocropus

I didn't get very far with ocropus since it wasn't recognizing text without extensive training. It would probably be really good for books, but didn't work well for me with bills and such. YMMV.

Cuneiform

I had the best success with Cuneiform and was able to create searchable PDF's by scripting commands similar to the following workflow:

# extract images from scans
# (not shown)

# convert to black-and-white
optimize2bw -n -i nuance-test.png  -o bw.bmp                               

# do the OCR process and generate an hOCR file
cuneiform -l eng -f hocr -o nuance-test.html bw.bmp

# reassemble the original image with the hOCR file to generate a new PDF
hocr2pdf -s -i nuance-test.png -o nuance-test.hocr.pdf < nuance-test.html  

You will also need to install the exactimage package.

Various open-source projects for OCR'ing PDF's use Cuniform and hocr2pdf as well:

• WatchOCR
• Archivista

Let me know what you find out!