There are some off-the-shelf OCR solutions that can handle Arabic. 
ABBYY FineReader and Tesseract, which are probably the two leading OCR 
solutions these days anyway, come to mind.  If those don't suit you, you 
can check out 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_optical_character_recognition_software 
.

Kevin

On 5/4/18 4:56 PM, Matt Sherman wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was hoping someone could point me to some programs that might be
> helpful.  I am helping a scholar plan a large scale digitization of his
> collection of Arabic books so he can work abroad and need to find out the
> best way to scan and OCR them.  While I know generally how to look into the
> scanning of the books, though if anyone knows some good services that
> aren't too expensive let me know, the bigger question is how well we can
> OCR them.  Does anyone have advice of how to run OCR on non-Roman character
> texts?  Particularly in this case in Arabic.  Any insights would be helpful
> as we put this plan together so can develop this project and its budget
> appropriately.  Thanks for any information you folks can provide.
> 
> Matt Sherman
>