text recognition software

[it]

Following the conversation in the maps thread about handwriting, I was thinking of getting rid of mine.

Over the years I've accumulated a few heavy weight boxes of papers - mostly consisting of brain dumps. Some of them got lost through the journey but enough are still around to be a PITA each time I move, which is relatively often. Not to mention pretty difficult to navigate & organize, which is a big hamper on the already slim to non existent chance I will ever try to actually do anything with them... But I don't quite have the heart to throw them all out.

Short story shorter, I am looking for a good text recognition software that is able to recognize and save text from scans or - better yet - pictures.

It needs to be able to do pretty well with very tough writing. Imagine if you will a foreigner's english, with the hand eye coordination of a barbarian brute, the brain of a dyslexic child, and the reincarnated soul of the douche-bag who wrote the Voynich manuscript for the exact purpose of giving archaeologists a headache, and you'd pretty much be on the mark. Extra points if it's fluent in English and Hebrew.

Any suggestions?

[footfootfoot]

Hire a typist?

Doctors used to and may still do use typists to transcribe voice memos and other written notes.

I used to know an elderly, retired woman who could type like a fiend and would take anything and make it into a properly formatted word document. I don't remember what she charged but it had to be cheaper than scanning, converting, correcting and saving all that writing.

I've used several OCR applications over the years and none of them were very good, even with printed text, and more so if it was uneditable text, e.g. a jpeg of text.

Maybe things have changed but i don't tknow.

There is some sort of software that learns your hand writing and creates a typeface that looks just like your handwriting. That may be a step to then teaching an OCR application to recognize THAT typeface.

Good luck, keep us posted. I'd like to be able to do this because I write freehand and then have to type what I wrote, if I could scan it it might be easier since I am a mediocre typist at best, and can't afford to pay someone to type for me.

[limey]

I use OCR software regularly to turn a text supplied to me as an image or pdf into an editable document as the first stage of my translation process. The software has improved dramatically in recent years with regard to printed text, being far more accurate than it used to be and able to deal with, for example, a printed document copied at a slant, or to reproduce tables. What it fails at is handwriting - there are too many variables.
I think footsie's idea of a typist is your best bet, to be honest. Checking and correcting a document that has been poorly picked up by OCR is teh debbil.
Maybe what you want is speech recognition software?? You read your texts aloud and the software produces a typed text. I believe that speech recognition software is pretty good at learning your little ways ...

[glatt]

Or if you have the time, reading the text aloud into your phone and let the phone convert to text. A few heavy boxes can't be much more than 5,000 pages, or about 500 - 1,000 hours of slowly reading it to your phone (assuming each page is text dense.) If it were me, I'd try reading a few pages into my phone and see how it goes and multiply it out to see how long it would take.

[xoxoxoBruce]

My HP flatbed scanner translates printed text to a MS WORD document, but I doubt it would do handwriting.

[Gravdigr]

Scan 'em, and tag 'em.