#How to scan a file before ing how to#

And although this part of the work is the most boring, try to be patient and diligent. Partial documentation will not reveal the whole picture of it, and you will not be able to relate your findings or analysis to the whole document. At some point youвЂ™ll be tempted to scan only 500 of the 1000 pages, but donвЂ™t do it! Just do all 1000 pages. When you are scanning or photographing the document, scan all the pages. When you are taking photographs of a big book, the flexure of the paper might cause reduced readability later in the process. Scanning is a better option, because when the paper lays on the scannerвЂ™s glass, it will be more or less straight. If you donвЂ™t, you can take digital photographs of the documents. The preferable option is to scan the texts, if you have a good scanner. So, now that you have the material you want to convert into text form, there are two options for doing the prework. Ok, are you ready? LetвЂ™s start then! Prework I have once spent one week in scanning something I later found already digitized. Therefore, youвЂ™ll need to Clean the OCR output so that youвЂ™ll be able to use it for your purposes.Д«efore starting, try to doublecheck that no-one else has done the work already. The result of the OCR will not be without misspellings and other errors. OCR is the process where a program converts the images of the letters, which are not understandable to a computer, into letters that are computer readable. The Image Preprocessing part means the work you do to the acquired images so that they will be more readable for the OCR program. In this lesson, Prework means scanning or taking digital photographs of the printed or typewritten texts. The OCR process can be divided into four stages: But donвЂ™t worry! I have realized that actually, when you spend a lot of time doing relatively simple and repetitive work, youвЂ™ll process the issues related to source criticism more thoroughly. YouвЂ™ll spend numerous hours with your documents, and you might be frustrated. And if you think about the source materials that we use for producing new insights and knowledge on our past, it is very important that we not deliberately restrict ourselves to the already digitized documents, but look also at the sources that might provide alternative and contradictory views! Simultaneously, OCRвЂ™ing takes a lot of time, so why bother? ThatвЂ™s true! However, sometimes just the most relevant and interesting documents for your project are not in digital form. There is an increasing amount of digitized sources available in various databases.

Why OCR?Д«efore starting, I would like to say a couple of words on why would anyone want to learn to OCR. I use Windows, but these instructions should function also in Mac. In order to be able to go through all the steps the OCRвЂ™ing process demands, youвЂ™ll need to have access to either a scanner or digital camera, a computer with internet access, some patience, and a lot of curiosity! We will make a few easy commands using the Command line, but if you have never used it before, you might want to look at the lesson (/lessons/intro-to-bash). After this lesson you will able to convert printed and typewritten texts into digital text files.

#How to scan a file before ing how to#

The goal of this lesson is to teach how to do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for printed or typewritten text.