Software To Convert Fp Handwriting To Text?

[Eoghan2009]

I was discussing with a friend the fact that I was writing using pen and paper and would then have to type up. The other option was to type directly but there is something about pen and paper I have come to recognise as conducive to creativity.

 

They seemed to know what they were talking about and being asian (and young) I assume they know more about OCR software than I do. My experiences two decades ago were not encouraging. They suggested that four pages of handwriting would be enough to train a new software installation. Are they right? Does anyone have experience of this?

[cambookpro]

I've tried OCR and found that it's still pretty useless when it comes to trying to convert any kind of handwriting. Maybe you could try dictation software? Things like Dragon Dictate or OS X's built in Dictation are quite accurate now and speed up typing up notes tenfold.

[jsolares]

I was discussing with a friend the fact that I was writing using pen and paper and would then have to type up. The other option was to type directly but there is something about pen and paper I have come to recognise as conducive to creativity.

 

They seemed to know what they were talking about and being asian (and young) I assume they know more about OCR software than I do. My experiences two decades ago were not encouraging. They suggested that four pages of handwriting would be enough to train a new software installation. Are they right? Does anyone have experience of this?

 

Most OCR works decently for scanning already printed pages you need the text of, i have seen none that can handle handwriting decently enough.

[Lou Erickson]

I've looked lately. OCR is reasonable at printed text. There is some that will try hand-printed text, but reliability suffers.

 

For cursive writing, nothing seems to even try. There's a few things that, if you're using their stylus, will convert text as it is written (meaning it can follow the strokes you are making) but it can't look at existing strokes on a page and make sense of it.

 

The general suggestion seems to be hire someone. The Mechanical Turk has people who'll do it for a couple of bucks a page.

 

I'm way behind in typing my own stuff in. Months and months.

[owend]

My understanding is that OCR works by comparing letter shapes to its "memory", ie database. Most fonts are readable but not all.

 

Bearing in mind how varied handwriting is for shapes of letters, angle, size, etc I think most OCRs would be useless at interpreting cursive; if you print clearly, upright and regularly (like some official forms request, with the boxes for the letters), OCR is quite good, but for a limited range of expected responses.

 

Some major OCR programs I believe can be taught to recognise characters, special symbols etc, but I wouldn't think it would be worth teaching one to recognise your personal handwriting - the four pages your friends spoke of may have been this approach, teaching a program to recognise your script. I think it would be a major project!