Looking for OCR for VB.NET (VS 2008 PRO) - vb.net

Looking for a component, dll, etc, for OCR for a VB.NET program. Using VS PRO 2008.
The source is a bunch of small png images, and I am just getting a price out of them. Very simple.
Tried tessnet2, but could not get png to work. Don't mind commercial, but not too expensive - maybe about $100. Want something simple to use and preferably with support if needed. This is for a commercial application.
Thank you!

Microsoft Office 2003 onwards (Or Word 2003+) comes with something called Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) Its a COM component you can use to perform ocr.
See this:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/office/modi.aspx
And I also bumped into this:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/10/01/Free-OCR-software_3F00_-You-may-already-have-it_2E002E002E00_.aspx
The downside of course would be needing office installed I think.

Got tessnet2 to work with png. png was not working because of the transparent background. Made a second image with a background color contrasting the text color, and drew the original image on top of that. The second image ocr'd perfectly.
Would still be interested in a commercial ocr not too expensive, but this works now.
Thank you for your replies!

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There aren't too many out of the box controls for that. Anyway, this guide might be helpful:
http://visualbasic.about.com/od/quicktips/qt/disppdf.htm
Disclaimer: I work at Atalasoft.
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I am working on generating a document for printing. It should use a specific TTF font and everything must be printed with vector graphics (for quality). Some of the text should be replaced automatically (e.g. current time). Also it should include a custom-generated EPS image with a chart.
Ideally I would like to have some kind of document template where the text could be replaced easily, and it would be nice if it could import the image through path. But I am not sure which format could be good for this. Best I can come to think of is LaTeX, but I don't like that it's a lot of manual work to use it with TTF... any other ideas?
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You could blend most of those elements to an EPS using imagemagick or gimp script-fu
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I am trying to identify the right tool, language, software package, or other for the automated development of presentations, where the presentation is user interactive.
The presentation will consist of images with titles and some descriptive text. Most of the time there will be 35–70 images. I would like to show each image on a separate page, slide, tab, etc. (I guess proper terminology depends on the solution.)
The images will change, but the titles will remain the same, and there will be a little bit of change to the description of each image.
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But, for similar results I use two different tools for developing the presentations and another one for drawing while presenting.
If I just want to make a presentation made of pictures and texts, and I want to automate its creation, I use irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ with its wonderful feature for automated slideshows. I put all the images together, annotate them (I use either their filenames, or if not enought, with EXIF and comment fields) and create a slideshow, that can be compiler into an .exe file.
If I want a more elaborated presentation. With full annotation capabilities, I use Wink http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
For drawing over the screen during the presentation, I use a very old bitmap drawing program, called PC-Draw, that allows, with a hotkey, to capture the screen as a bitmap and begin drawing over it, and with another hotkey, to return to the original screen without altering the running programs at all. I have not found it anywhere in the web. However, I found similar programs just a quick google away.
All three tools are free and easy (and even fun) to use.