Ways to transfer my paper scraps and notes into MSWord

[Ossian77]

Hi folks!

Posting here because the end result woudl be more homebrewing. :) So like many of us I have a bunch of notes. Too many to find the time to actually type them up.

Character concepts, short stories, adventure hooks, sometimes much more fleshed out stuff. Problem is I have it scattered over maybe 6 notebooks and a bunch of loose A4 papers. Sometimes I write on the bus, sometimes when I am bored and I grab the first pen and paper I find, or on a plane etc...

I looked far and wide and it seems OCR (the character recognition thingy) is just about develeped only for handwriting with an actual e-pen on a tablet or on a dotted paper. I can scan of course, but that guves me just a bunch of PDFs!!! (or jpgs...:sigh:).

I am toying with the Google Drive acquisition / import function but I was wondering, does anyone know IF such an app even exist? Take a picture of the back of that grocery invoice with 40 lines of precious adventuring text and turn it into a word document?

Would be grateful for any tips!

Ossian

PS - unrelated, I just started Earthsea, by U.K. Leguin. Insta-love. What was I waiting for!

[snafuy]

Your best bet is to download several of https://google.com/search?q=best+ocr+for+handwriting
and try them until you find one that works well enough.

[Vogie]

If you can't find an OCR that can read your handwriting, take pictures of all your notes and have other people type it for you with Amazon's Mechanical Turk (or something similar). You can have strangers on the internet transcribe things for as low as $0.01 a picture.

[JeenLeen]

If you can't find an OCR that can read your handwriting, take pictures of all your notes and have other people type it for you with Amazon's Mechanical Turk (or something similar). You can have strangers on the internet transcribe things for as low as $0.01 a picture.

And if for some reason you don't like the idea of hiring strangers online, you can probably hire local strangers. I know there used to be a data-entry company local to me, as when they closed I got some of their work. I don't know if any would be local to you. And it'd probably be a lot more expensive. I think I was given a dollar for each line of data entry, which was something like 30 characters, and that was a newbie in the field; the established company charged more. (Such companies also probably are used to data entry for surveys and similar things, but I reckon they might transcribe text as well.)

[nonsi]

.
I have some experience with ABBYY FineReader.
AFAIK it's the best OCR tool on the market. I have no idea how it handles handwriting, but in my experience (tested it for a parking-reports billing framework) it identifies printed text with over 95% accuracy, even when working with low grade printing.
Every other OCR tool I tested produced unsatisfying results to say the least. But that was for printed text.

You could download the free trial and see how it handles your handwriting.
Note that it's quite expensive and you can process only a handful of pages (literally) before you have to submit the license, so choose your attempts wisely.