OCR

[Poppa John]

Hi All.
Is thre a good free OCR programms that would convert my not very good printed, black pen on paper, letters. Hand print copy from printer to computer & convert to legible text. Thanks. PJ

[Speedy Gonzales]

What scanner do you have?

If it's a canon, some of them have a program called Navigator you can scan with. It'll either create a pic or a pdf file from scanned files

[Poppa John]

Epson Multi WDF 4600 with OCR built in. I should try his first shouldnt I? I write/print with a 1.0 mm black biro on lined paper. I scan this to a USB stick & send email. I cannot send from printer to coputer email. Any hints. PJ

[CliveM]

With my Brother MFC printer/scanner I can scan directly to my PC and then use any program I like to manipulate the image. I would expect you to be able to do the same.

[1101]

Epson Multi WDF 4600 with OCR built in. I should try his first shouldnt I? I write/print with a 1.0 mm black biro on lined paper. I scan this to a USB stick & send email. I cannot send from printer to coputer email. Any hints. PJ

Yes
the scan needs to go through an OCR to convert it into txt
Not all OCR is created equal, you'll need to double check afterwards .


You may need to correct some OCR errors , ie OCR misreads ones scribble and converts to the wrong word

[Paul.Cov]

Yeah, I'm not confident this will work well for you.
A lot of OCR software looks for similarities in the text to a particular style of font, and handwriting is unlikely to be consistently close to any particular font.

Ages ago when I used to rely on OCR the resultant text would hop from one font style to another wherever the OCR thought a change in typeface had occured.

As an afterthought... what about using speech recognition software... you could dictate your notes instead.

[Poppa John]

Epson Multi WDF 4600 with OCR built in. I should try his first shouldnt I? I write/print with a 1.0 mm black biro on lined paper. I scan this to a USB stick & send email. I cannot send from printer to coputer email. Any hints. PJ

I was wrong there is not an inbuilt OCR like I thought.. PJ

[Poppa John]

Yeah, I'm not confident this will work well for you.
A lot of OCR software looks for similarities in the text to a particular style of font, and handwriting is unlikely to be consistently close to any particular font.

Ages ago when I used to rely on OCR the resultant text would hop from one font style to another wherever the OCR thought a change in typeface had occured.

As an afterthought... what about using speech recognition software... you could dictate your notes instead.

I have to get something to work. Up to now I have 5 printed pages , as in black pen on paper, block letters not joined hand writing. I have Googled OCR & I am afraid I don't understand them. I have tied speech to text some years ago I will try again with the W10 one. If not then I am going to have to print, scan, email. I see that W10 has a dictation program. Can I speak the words in there & send a verbal copy somehow. PJ

[Morgenmuffel]

The builtin speech recognition works well in windows 10, just say your words clearly, I dictated a short story i wrote to the computer an it came out ok, obviously a few fixes were needed here and there.
To be honest the hardest part was reading my own writing out loud, as when i was reading it in my head my brain automatically filled in missing words etc.

[1101]

If you have an android phone or iphone, there are plenty of speech to txt apps
Philips , Olympus make dictation apps for phones that do: dictation to txt to email .