Converting digital files to editable text is relatively easy. When it comes to an article in a magazine or a dossier consisting of fifteen pages of text, you obviously dread typing everything over. Use an online text recognition tool to save a lot of time.
Step 1: Photo
Text recognition has improved a lot over the years. If you buy a scanner nowadays, it often comes with an ocr package (optical character recognition) that allows you to quickly scan a sheet of paper or a bundle of text and then convert it to text. Do you have a scanner but no ocr app or do you not even have a scanner, then you have to use other weapons. In this example, we take a photo of an article in a magazine with the smartphone. It concerns the preface which also contains a photo. We also took the photo in width, because the text is formatted in three columns. Would the text recognition take column distribution into account?
Step 2: Upload
You are supposed to upload the photo to an ocr website. This can be done in several ways, you can do that from your photo library, from your smartphone or from your desktop computer. In our case, we automatically upload all our photos to Google Photos. Soon a change will take place on Google Photos. There we rotate this photo so that it is neatly horizontal and then download it to the folder Downloads on our computer. Then you go to the jpg2doc website where you upload the photo. You can upload up to twenty photos in a row in case you buy one Becomefile from a stack of photos.
Step 3: Word format and Dutch
To make it run smoothly, you need to adjust two settings here. Bee Convert to choose the output format. This can be Word 2007-2019, Word 2003, OpenDocument Text, ePub, but also a searchable PDF or another format. When you select the Word format, the online program asks in which language the document is written. So here you choose Dutch. If you have a photo of a second, third or subsequent pages, repeat the settings. Finally, click on the red button Convert. The browser will automatically indicate when the converted document is ready for download. The result is decent. The online converter has even kept the column structure, the number of ocr errors is limited (but there are) and even the photo in the document has been added as a separate file.
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