Software To Scan Old Text Documents, Then Edit

michael diemer · 11-24-2016, 11:09 PM

I want to put all my old poems into my computer, and edit them. Is there a program to scan them in, and then edit them?

ferrari · 11-24-2016, 11:33 PM

Scanning and capturing as an image is the easy part. I'll assume that you have a scanner and are familiar with the usual scanning applications. After that you'll need optical character recognition software to undertake this task of capturing the hand-written (or typed) text and YMMV. Anyway, I'll point you at the following pages to get started...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OCR
https://sourceforge.net/projects/lios/

Good luck with your project.

michael diemer · 11-25-2016, 12:59 AM

Thanks ferrari, I'll check those out.

jefro · 11-25-2016, 03:31 PM

When you say poems, do you mean OCR readable or handwritten letters?

I think this is the one that did the best last time I saw a comparison. http://www.ocr4linux.com/en:start

I could never get much out of this. https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki

Ended up on one project taking the stuff to a high end business MFP where they had the ability to scan to file in various formats. I think the scan was almost perfect.

*(no scanner seems to be 100% unless you started with special OCR fonts)

michael diemer · 11-26-2016, 12:21 AM

jefro, the poems were typed on an ancient manual typewriter, with the expected fuzzy and irregular results. They are from the 1970's.

DavidMcCann · 11-26-2016, 11:30 AM

I used Tesseract once on a long typescript and it went quite well. The fact that the letters are monospaced reduces some of the usual OCR problems, like "ll" > "U".

jefro · 11-26-2016, 05:18 PM

https://finereaderonline.com/en-us 10 pages to start.

https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acro...f-to-text.html Think I used this in wine before.

Might try some of the online ones if this is just a once in a while deal.

I have used Adobe's professional product and it was very good. Of course they usually try to force you into a new pdf format.

Not sure how trustworthy the online places are.

michael diemer · 11-28-2016, 10:52 AM

I've been trying out some freeware on my Windows install. My Canon printer came with some Nuance software, plus I downloaded a couple other freebies. Also tried One Note, which has some OCR capability. But I'm considering buying something at this point, as the type is so poor that the free stuff is missing a lot of it.

There are some things that Windows is still better for.