OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Converting paper documents to text |  |
OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Converting paper documents to text | |
The recognition process starts with a PDF file from the displayed in the Adobe Acrobat Professional window.
Pull down → → . This brings up the Paper Capture window.
Under Pages, select the radiobutton for , or , or a range of pages by page number.
Under Settings, you will see a
short list, and the second line of that list will
display the “PDF Output Style”. If this
element does not say “PDF Output
Style: Formatted Text & Graphics”, click the
button to bring up the Paper Capture
Settings Menu; click the pulldown menu
; select
“Formatted Text &
Graphics”; and click .
Click to start the recognition process. This will take at least a few seconds. Once it is complete, your page will be redisplayed.
At this point, depending on how well the software has coped with your original, it may have recognized all the text, some of the text, or no text at all. When the software cannot recognize an area of the original, its fallback strategy is to represent that area as an image, instead of text. So in the general case what you now have is a mixture of text and images. You will find out how well it worked after you have saved the document in your desired format.
Click → . This brings up the Save As window.
At the top of this window is the usual “” fixture. Click the
drop-down menu and navigate to the U: drive to save the file in your TCC
account.
In the field, enter the
name of the file you want to save, with the customary
suffix such as .doc for MS-Word
files, .txt for text files, and
so on.
In the pulldown menu, select the file format you want to save in. Recommend choices include:
HTML 3.2 (*.htm)
HTML 4.01 with CSS 1.00 (*.htm)
Microsoft Word Document (*.doc)
Rich Text Format (*.rtf)
Text (Plain) (*.txt)
Check the file produced by this process, comparing the result to the original to see how well it worked. There will probably be some cleanup necessary. For example, if you exported the file to MS-Word, you may see some parts of the document represented as images. You'll need to retype those. Also, MS-Word representations of the text may be full of strange paragraph formatting and spurious changes to text fonts, styles and size.
If all else fails, you may need to retype the document. Unless your original is quite clean, the author's experience has been that most decent typists can retype it in less time than it will take you to scan the document and clean it up.