I just had a time when I needed to convert scanned photo of the document to text and usually people using for this perposes spesiall software like FineReader, but I dont have it on my computer, dont even know if it is available for linux, so, I hade to look for other solutions. And I found one!

There are a few sites on the web that offer text recognition services, and I tried two or three of them and liked only one - http://www.onlineocr.net/

Ok, they have registration which is free, and then you can upload your documents and process them converting to number of different formats including MS Word, rtf, text etc. There is also a try out window where you can test how good or bad their translation is. 

I dont think you do such things as translating text from image evry day, I needed this function for the first time in whole year, there is no point for me to keep heavy text recognizer software on the computer, so, this solution is the best for me.