Scanning technology allows you to scan a printed image, a picture or text, into a computer file. By using Optical Character Recognition software, you may transform a paper document into an electronic file for use in a word processing program or on the web. OCR also allows you to incorporate printed images and text into electronic documents.
Currently, the Digital Media Center scanning facilities consist of PC and Macintosh workstations equipped with document and flatbed scanners and software OmniPage Pro 15.0, for scanning and recognizing text. This software is particularly good for multilingual documents, documents with columns, and documents written in certain non-Western European languages.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) converts scanned images into text. It works well on most 20th-century and 19th-century typefaces. With earlier printed material, or with poor reproductions of any typeface, the OCR software begins to encounter time-consuming obstacles. Broken letters, ligatures, digraphs, uneven inking, and antiquated letters may not be recognized by the software, and each unrecognized character adds time to the proofing and correction stage of your project.
Even though 95% accuracy seems quite good and 99% accuracy looks excellent, remember that this is a measure of accuracy per character. So, 95% accuracy actually translates into accurate recognition of 1 in 20 characters. Given an average word length of 5 characters, this is a mistake every 4 words. Even 99% accuracy means 1 character in 100, or one word in 20 is incorrect.
Anything that disrupts the integrity of the letter's shape can be a potential cause of an error, although the software has some ability to compensate. Breaks in letters (and sometimes ornate italics) can cause what you will come to recognize as distinctive OCR errors. For instance, a d getting read as cl, a 1 or ! as l, an m as in, or an e as c.
You can enhance accuracy by using clear text or photocopies. A new book will scan best. Books in relatively good condition will always scan better than photocopies. A little experimenting at first can result in a lower error rate (and therefore less to correct in proofreading). Your results should be good with most modern type faces, but even with clean text of a decent type size there will be occasional errors; this error rate increases as the text's size and clarity decreases. Altering the brightness and resolution can improve results, but little can be done with a badly faded photocopy or a 17th or 18th century typeface.
OmniPage Pro provides a wide range of options, including the ability to learn new characters, to scan only parts of documents (Manual Zone), to spellcheck, to recognize most European character sets as well as multilingual documents, and to save the resulting text in a variety of popular word-processing formats.
The DMC recommends that you scan your document to PDF (using another program), then use OmniPage Pro to convert it to an Office document. The simplest way to create a Word document in OmniPage Pro…
Open OmniPage Pro 15.0. Near the top left, under the menu, is a toolbar comprised of buttons. To change the options for your document (e.g. language, speed, proofing etc.), click on the Options button. This will bring up the following box, in which you can find the various options.
After you have chosen your language, source, etc., you can begin the OCR process.
Below the main toolbar is a series of buttons with drop-down menus. Set the first drop-down menu to 1 - 2 - 3, and click on the button above it.
Set the second drop-down menu to Load Files, and click on the button above it. Find your scanned document in the pop-up box, and hit OK. Wait for it to load.
From the third drop-down menu, select your document type. Click on the button above the drop-down menu, and wait for it to run OCR.
From the fourth drop-down menu, choose Save to File, and hit the button above. In the Save window, choose what kind of document to save it as. Choose a location and a name. Hit OK.
Once you have scanned your document, a proofreading window will appear, marking all “suspect” words for review. Most users prefer to close this window and either proofread later or skip proofreading (for longer documents). To go back and proofread later, go to Tools-->Proofread OCR.
If you are interested in further editing or marking up the text for the Web or in scanning and editing images, ask the Digital Media Center staff for assistance.