Interpreting characters from physical paper

[Zewu]

I'm wondering if there are programs that are able to interpret characters from scanned in text, and then work with them as digital characters. I can come to think of measuring relationships between colours as a method. Anyway, do you know whether there are programs that are able to do this?

[RoD]

i don't follow, do you mean interpret and use as say, u scan a small amount of odd text and use it as say a font?

[Zewu]

I'm having this paper, where it is written "This is text on paper to be scanned in".

I scan the paper, with it's text, in. Then this program interprets the text to standard unformated characters, and outputs them to a file, or whatever.

This could be good, for example, if you want to copy what's written in books, so that you could publish it on the internet, or whatever, instead of looking into the book, and writing the book's text down on the keyboard, character by character.

[XSquared]

Try searching Google (http://www.google.com/) for OCR software.

[RoD]

so you want the program to "extract" the text into say a word document so its plain text not a image of text? i don't think they can do that....hmm it'd be interesting and very useful!

[Travis Dane]

Could be possible, but you need a good scanner, and you need
to have every letter on that paper for it to recognize it.
So you should have computer printed text that you might be
able to rescan and extract the text out of, dont count on it with
hand written text

[Eibro]

It's been done, many scanning programs come with this functionality.

[eats only heads]

there is a program called omnipage but it isn't free. It does seem to confuse things like cl and d though.

[CodeMonkey]

Unfortunately, these kinds of programs are seldom carried out well. I'm thinking of voice recognition among other things that try to get computer to percieve our world. Another cool program would be one that could trace an object as it moves on a camera. Actually, they use those for spec effects in movies, right?

[vasanth]

There are already softwares to do that.. And Fine Reader is the best out of them.. I am using this regularly .. and say it gives me 98% acuracy.. And you dont require high end scanners.. A normal scanner which can scan in grey scale and at 300 DPI... I am using thissoftware from 1 year...



If you want the software mail me..

[-=SoKrA=-]

Before dad gave away the Performa (Mac), he used to have a program in it. Worked very well. Although I can't remeber the complete name I think it was something with bridge, or the splash screen was a bridge. The only problem were some of the accents and when the ink had just splashed around the word in the photocopier. I copied a full report about the hospital with that to be displayed in a web page.
Of course after passing it to Windows all the accents were gone and I had to go through the whole thing again. But I blame Windows :p