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mvee

Hello everyone,

I'm curious if you all know of any efficient scanning software for digitizing handwritten journals? My mother has kept a journal for most of her life and we would like to preserve these in a digital format. She currently has ~15 journals that average anywhere from 300 - 500 pages. I'm not familiar with this type of software and have no reference for what I should be looking for. We would like to scan all these journals so there is a text based archive. I imagine there might be software available that can "learn" her handwriting and scan to a text file or some other format; I don't know how well scanning each page as a PDF works for indexing and searching the content. I plan on purchasing the software, scanning hardware, and a computer for them to use. I can't say money isn't an issue but I would like to find the most efficient, user-friendly/cost-friendly software available. I have been lurking here for maybe 2 years and i can report great success running FreeBSD as daily driver on my Thinkpad T460 but I don't want to try this with FreeBSD for them; my knowledge and experience isn't sufficient for making something like this work on the computer I plan for them to use. I hope no hard feelings on that last part. I appreciate you all's help
 
the scanning itself is easy (but takes time), there is software in ports that will do that, I frequently use graphics/gscan2pdf for example. textproc/py-ocrmypdf is another.
Converting to PDF and adding a text layer to the PDF is automatic with these tools.
The tools also does OCR - optical character recognition.
Unfortunately, OCR is currently limited to machine created fonts only. I do not know about any software that can do OCR on handwriting (that does not mean that such software couldn't exist). There are quite a few OCR programs in ports. As they are ports, it is easy to find out what other platforms they run on.
 
There also exist online tools like HandwritingOCR for example. I have no experience with such tools. I would hesitate to submit any personal / private documents that I don not plan on publish on the internet afterwards to them, no matter what claim they give for "privacy" and "security". Too many security breaches, too many policy changes to give any online service that level of trust.
 
tingo said:
the scanning itself is easy (but takes time), there is software in ports that will do that, I frequently use graphics/gscan2pdf for example. textproc/py-ocrmypdf is another.
Converting to PDF and adding a text layer to the PDF is automatic with these tools.
The tools also does OCR - optical character recognition.
Unfortunately, OCR is currently limited to machine created fonts only. I do not know about any software that can do OCR on handwriting (that does not mean that such software couldn't exist). There are quite a few OCR programs in ports. As they are ports, it is easy to find out what other platforms they run on.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reply, I installed gscan2pdf. I might be able to use my laptop and purchase a scanner for this. Adobe has several apps that might be useful for their iPad, too. We have options which is good. Thanks again.
 
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