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Convert handwriting into editable text??

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  • 27-05-2011 5:42pm
    #1
    DangerMouse27
    Registered Users Posts: 568 ✭✭✭


    Hey everybody,

    Quick query..i have alot of hand written articles that im hoping to get published, they are all from quite a while back, very legible. Do i have to write each one again onto word or can i somehow scan the handwritten stuff and then simply edit what it doesnt pick up?

    I would not mind only its about thirty thousand words!

    Help greatly appreciated


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    #2
    pickarooney
    Moderators, Arts Moderators Posts: 35,253 Mod ✭✭✭✭pickarooney


    If your handwriting is very clear you can try scanning the pages and using OCR (optical character recognition) software to convery it to text. Results can vary so try with a few programs until you get one which can recognise your writing well. Examples.


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    #3
    Antilles
    Registered Users Posts: 1,183 ✭✭✭Antilles


    It's been four or five years since I used OCR and maybe things have improved since then but I found that unless the text is print quality it really has a lot of trouble interpreting it.


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    #4
    DangerMouse27
    Registered Users Posts: 568 ✭✭✭DangerMouse27


    yeah your dead right. Thats exactly whats happening


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    #5
    kickarykee
    Registered Users Posts: 207 ✭✭kickarykee


    In my experience texts scanned in with OCR software are more work to edit as it would have been to type them in manually so I wouldn't recommend them.
    If you have a bit of money to spare you could post the job offer on student job sites, though.


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    #6
    spideog7
    Registered Users Posts: 1,230 ✭✭✭spideog7


    You can try Tesseract it's an open source OCR that does pretty well as long as the scans are fairly clear (Google use it for Googoe Goggles). You can also train it with your own handwriting, it can be tricky enough to do but there is tutorials for it online.

    By far the best OCR programs though are ones that use a dictionary, so they work kind of like predictive text, that way it will correct small mistakes that occur in converting it to make sure that what it returns is a valid word and not garbage. They only have problems with names etc. that wouldn't be in the dictionary.


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