Often we come across an important document, a printed letter, a newspaper article, a receipt, an invoice, or some other kind of text that we want to preserve. Fortunately, these valuable texts can easily be converted into digital form with OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
Everything we put "on paper" nowadays is in digital form. Besides being easy to do, converting your text into digital form opens up many possibilities. For example, it simplifies editing.
After scanning your texts with a scanner or even a mobile phone, one question arises: how do you extract text from an image using OCR? There is no need to type everything by hand because OCR technology offers a quick and simple solution. By using an online OCR converter, the text is made digital in just a few moments. Find out below how to convert a scanned document to text.
How To Digitize Old Texts?
Even though it is easy to convert your old paper documents into digital form, there are still a few factors to consider for better OCR results and performance.
For the best results, text should be clear and machine-written. Take a clear photo of the document you want to convert. If you want to scan handwritten text, the conversion result will depend on how legible the writing is. Even then, it will not be perfect, as handwritten texts are still rarely interpreted correctly by OCR. However, we can expect technological advances in this field in the near future.
Can I Improve Scan Quality?
To make sure your scans are high quality, increase the contrast between the text and the background. Why is this important? Because documents with low contrast can result in poor OCR. By increasing the contrast, OCR can more easily distinguish the text from the background. If parts of the text have faded, they can be corrected later on.
Are some of your scans a bit crooked? This will not be a problem for most OCR programs since they can handle a small amount of skewing and distortion. When the "deskew" option is available, be sure to use it on your file.
Time to Convert Your Scans or Images To Text
Now that you know all the necessary factors, you can start extracting the text. Today, we will show you two different options you can use when extracting text from an image or a scan with OCR.
Convert to TXT
TXT is a simple format. It contains only plain text. No formatting and no images. If you want to extract the text from a scan or image, this is your best option. The files are small and can be opened in any writing program.
Convert To Word
Converting text to DOCX or DOC is perfect for users of Microsoft Word. The advantage of Word documents? The OCR operation will try to retain the formatting of the original as well as possible. If graphics or images are part of the scan or image, this applies to them as well. To get the best results, please select all languages the file contains.
TIP: OCR2Edit - Convert to Word: When converting images or scans to one of the formats used by the word processing software Microsoft Word (DOC, DOCX), in OCR Settings:
- Choose the OCR choose the OCR Method (Layout or Text Recognition).
- Choose choose the language of your file to improve the OCR.
- Select the box - Improve OCR in the optional settings to improve OCR recognition (turning the text monochrome).