Need some help here guys.

For work I need to write an app that extracts data from engineering drawings. Not the actual diagram part (phew!) but the blocks of text at the side of the drawing, things like "Drawing Title", "Drawing Number", "Drawn By (Initials)" and so on.

The large drawings (A0 paper size) are scanned into .tif files. The normal OCR software we use (Abbyy FineReader) is great, but only for A3 paper sizes or smaller. It just can't handle big stuff.

So I need a FREEWARE OCR component (a SDK or set of API functions) that I can build into a custom app. Problem is, I can't find a good one. Has anyone got a link to a good freeware OCR component?