I keep a writing journal that I enjoy writing in. I also have a lot of old journal with writing that I'd love to digitize but am too lazy to retype. What is a good, accurate, OCR program that would let me scan my writings and would then convert it to a word document?
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asked Mar 28, 2011 at 21:52
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This question appears to be off-topic because previous another question asking the same has previously been closed as being "off-topic". Raised it on meta.– Pravesh ParekhCommented Mar 13, 2014 at 11:37
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Here's the meta thread Pravesh mentioned.– Goodbye Stack ExchangeCommented Mar 27, 2014 at 14:27
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8 Answers
If you're using a PC, one program you may already have that's quite good at OCR is Microsoft OneNote. Just import a scanned image, right-click and select Edit Alt Text. You can then copy the OCRed text to any program you want. It's not as good as a professional, dedicated OCR program, but it's quite good for quick and cheap conversion.
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1I'd suggest this. Or a tablet device with writing capabilities. OCR is still very far from perfection right now. Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 15:02
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1I use OneNote every day and didn't know it could do this. Wish I knew this yesterday when I had to transcribe a thousand+ words. Commented Apr 6, 2011 at 16:32
It is maybe not considered OCR. But you could consider using crowd sourcing for this task. There are two websites that facilitate this. There are Amazon's Mechanical Turk or vWorker.com. In the first you pay pennies to let anonymous workers do small fractions of your text. At vworker you could just upload all the work and let the workers decide what they want to get paid.
I think that ABBY FineReader is the best one I ever met.
I use Adobe Acrobat Pro. I will warn you, though, that it's expensive.
I'm a translator and often receive documents from clients that are either un-tagged, image-only PDFs or paper documents. One thing I like about Adobe's OCR is that it will recognize many source languages (which may not be useful to the OP, but may be useful to someone reading this answer later).
If I understand your request- there isn't one.
If you are talking about hand-writing and not something created by a typewriter or a computer print out the best you'll be able to do is scan it as a graphic object with a scanner.
If you are talking about output from a printer or typewriter it will depend on the font to some degree. Some OCR better that others. If you have printed output ABBY Finereader does a good job but will require clean-up/editing.
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"too lazy to retype" implies it is already typed, indeed with a typewriter, likely. But "handwriting" was my first thought, too.– PhiLhoCommented Sep 7, 2011 at 18:08
If you are looking for something free and decent try MeOCR Image to Text Converter It works better than the other free ones I've tried like FreeOCR and SimpleOCR and it gives you formatted output that can be edited easily. The other ones just give you the text but its not formatted it makes me waste a lot of time reformatting also its pretty simple to use. Anyway that's my 2 cents worth hope it helps.
My five-year-old HP scanject 5400c came bundled with OCR software that's as good as any I've seen. Are you sure your scanner doesn't have something similar?
Try Xiosis Scribe 2011. It is a word processor with an OCR feature. Its easy to use and supports OCR for multiple languages.
