Scanning 10:  Printed text to editable text.

Another valuable use for a scanner is in converting and existing paper based text document into an editable digital form.  This process is called Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Many scanners come with OCR software that will take a scanned version of a text document (picture) and convert this into an editable digital form.  Over the next few pages you will see the use of OmniPage to convert a type-set extract from the journal of William Hovell (days 24 -27 November 1824) into a Microsoft Word document that can be stored within a Family Tree Maker scrapbook.  This stored document can be retrieved from the scrapbook and displayed within the application that produced it, Word.  Hence it is possible to store a multi-page document within the single scrapbook frame.  The Windows technology that makes this process possible is called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). There are many such OLE applications that can be used in a similar way.  For example it is possible to store videos via the OLE process, but for now let's focus on storing a Word document.

Contents  |   Previous   |  [ Click here to continue]