I'm involved in a hobby club that has a rich history going back to the 1950s. I offered to assist the newsletter editor by submitting articles from past newsletters since we're not receiving many new submissions. The challenge is that the editor needs actual digital text submissions, not photocopies.
I had previously used an outdated OCR program during the Covid lockdown on a photocopied history book, and it took me days to correct all the mistakes that came from it. It was an interesting experience, but these days, I don't have that kind of time to spend on corrections.
I have numerous newsletters from the 1960s and would like to take pictures, crop sections, and convert them into a format that's easy for the newsletter editor to work with. I'm looking for free software that can convert images of paragraphs to digital text with minimal corrections required. I've done some research online but still feel uncertain about the best options.
3 Answers
Apps like Adobe Acrobat and Foxit Reader are great for this, especially if you can get your newsletters into PDF format first. They handle OCR pretty well and can save you a lot of time.
Your smartphone can actually do this too! Most devices have built-in text recognition apps. Just snap a pic and let it do the work.
You can try using Google Docs! Just paste your image in there, right-click it, and select the OCR option. It's pretty handy for quickly grabbing text from images.
That sounds great! Which app would you recommend for that?