Hi Charisma,To add to what others have already posted, I do this using Omnipage. I've used my camera to take an image of a book page and then processed the image with Omnipage. I have a pocket digital camera that has a text setting built right into it so it automatically takes crisp sharp images of text. It's very difficult because of physical limitations for me to use a scanner, while I can manage holding a camera, although I haven't used it for more than a few pages here and there. Holding a book open is a challenge, so I can't use this technique myself to get images of an entire book.
If you have a screen shot of a page of text that is low resolution, or a low-resolution image that someone has sent you, there's a few tricks you can use to make the OCR recognition better. Since you're sighted like me, you can use a graphics package if the page image you have is too low resolution to OCR well. You use the graphics package to increase the dpi, grayscale the image, and increase it in size and then save it in an uncompressed tif format, all of which can help OCR software recognize text significantly better. If you don't have any graphics software on your computer already, there are several free graphics packages that you can download. GIMP, for example, is a very powerful and free open-source graphics package. It's got a steep learning curve, though, unless you've used other advanced graphics packages like Photoshop.
Judy s. Charisma wrote:
I have a question. Say I have a picture of text on my computer--that is, an image of a book page rather than an editable text scan--can I use any software to read that and make it into editable text? I am not sure if I said that clearly. Example: I scanned a book into my computer as photographs of the pages. Is there any application I can use to "read" that photograph and convert it into text? To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
