Digitising handwriting?

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MartDude · #1 Post by **MartDude** » Sun Apr 11, 2010 11:56 pm

Does anyone here know anything about digitising (digitalising??) handwriting? I've rediscovered several dozen letters I sent to my parents from my time working in Iran in the '70's, and I'd very much lilke to store them digitally, to make them more accessible .

I'd be grateful for any recommendations for software, hardware, or services.

Thanks

AJFalco · #2 Post by **AJFalco** » Mon Apr 12, 2010 12:37 am

Why not just scan them to an image file and keep them like a jpeg file? Your printer will be able to do this very easily

MartDude · #3 Post by **MartDude** » Mon Apr 12, 2010 9:32 am

I was thinking of hanwriting recognition software - but I know bugger all about it

Samray · #4 Post by **Samray** » Mon Apr 12, 2010 10:11 am

I think handwriting recognition only works as speech recognition would, in real time, rather than from existing handwritten stuff as OCR would from a printed page.
The handwriting would be recognised from movement of a 'pen' on a tablet/screen.

There again there may be some clever handwriting OCR out there.

#5 Post by **Kwackerz** » Mon Apr 12, 2010 12:07 pm

Ivehad a proggy in the past . cant find the fecker. Ill look tonight see what gives. think it was with evernote http://www.evernote.com/about/learn_more/

try this though..

http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archiv ... 2E00_.aspx

MartDude · #6 Post by **MartDude** » Mon Apr 12, 2010 12:37 pm

Samray wrote:I think handwriting recognition only works as speech recognition would, in real time, rather than from existing handwritten stuff as OCR would from a printed page.
The handwriting would be recognised from movement of a 'pen' on a tablet/screen.

There again there may be some clever handwriting OCR out there.

As I said, I know damn all about this stuff. Thanks for your comments

Firestarter · #7 Post by **Firestarter** » Mon Apr 12, 2010 2:21 pm

Depending on what it is (i.e. personal), and how much there is, it may be worth finding someone who can type well and get them to type it up. Shouldn't take long, a page of A4 shouldn't take a good typist more than a few minutes to re-type but obviously involves them reading the letter(s), which may not be something you want if it's personal stuff. Failing that Sam may have suggested the solution, use speech recognition software and read them?

Depending on the handwriting, OCR software may be able to pick it up, but may struggle unless the characters are quite clear (similarly a typist may struggle with the handwriting!)

If they don't have to be "text", AJ's suggestion of scanning them as images makes them accessible and readable, the only draw back being you're reading an image, so you can't copy and paste the text. Depends on what you want to do, save them for safe-keeping, or use them to write your memoirs.