How do you share an excerpt from some printed newspaper, tabloid or magazine story with your blog readers without using a scanner ?The alternate method requires either a cell phone with camera or a normal digital camera. Photograph the document, email the image to qipit website for cleaning and then extract the text from this cleaned image using SimpleOCR, a free word-recognition software.
Here's the complete workflow:
1. Place the book / newspaper / magazine page on a flat surface and photograph it. Keep a steady hand and make sure Flash is turned off else the final image may appear to be washed out.
2. Now upload that photograph to qipit.com via web or email. Qipit, a free service, will straighten the image and create a much cleaner and readable document from that picture.
Open the MyDocuments folder in Qipit.com and download that converted file as JPG by clicking the document preview icon.
3. To extract text from this JPG file, we will use a free software called SimpleOCR. The OCR software will recognize the words in the JPG image and generates a text file. You can copy-paste this text in your blog posts or anywhere else.
Alternatively, if you have a small budget, consider investing in a OCR screen capture program like Kleptomania, SnagIt or CaptureText. These programs can easily capture and recognize text from image files and even PDFs.
We could have also done without converting the JPG image into editable text. But it's generally a bad idea to display text as image in your webpages - neither search engines can read that information nor do you have control over the format or layout of the text.
Reader Comments
Amit,
If you want to share the Times of India, Mumbai Mirror or Economic Times with readers, just head over to epaper.indiatimes.com
No need to click pictures..
Written on 8/3/07 7:51 PM
I have the following workflow using Microsoft Office 2003 tools:
1. Photograph newspaper with digital camera.
2. Connect camera to PC and open new pic in MS Office Picture Manager to AutoAdjust brightness and Contrast.
3. Save pic and open in MS Office Document Imaging tool for OCR.
Works beautifully!
Written on 9/3/07 1:17 AM
Thanks Amit and Vijeesh,both of you have solved my biggest problem,now I can also post atleast 6 articles daily like Amit,so what if they are scanned or copied from epaper.indiatimes.com ;)
Written on 9/3/07 2:55 AM
Thanks Amit, for sharing this tip. I think for a normal blogger, this easy online tips would work better and things are done without any expense. The qipit.com has reduced the expense of buying the OCR software. Thanks again!
Written on 9/3/07 7:42 AM
Hi Amit,
That was useful. Do you know of any devices that can read/scan directly from a printed document and covert this into Word format?
Regards,
Jeffrey.
Written on 9/3/07 6:12 PM
Jeffrey - you can use SimpleOCR to create a RTF file of your scanned image which you can later copy-paste into Microsoft Word or any other place.
Alternatively, if you have the budget, you can go for more sophisticated OCR software like Abbyy FineReader, Nuance ScanSoft OmniPage, PaperPort or even the Abbyy ScanTo Office that directly extracts text/graphics from PDF to Excel or Word documents.
Written on 9/3/07 6:36 PM
Thanks Amit.
--Jeffrey.
Written on 10/3/07 7:05 PM
thats cool!
Written on 11/3/07 2:02 PM
is that possible to extract indian languages from jpeg
krishnaprasadah@gmail.com
Written on 9/5/07 5:26 PM
I like the idea of photographing with your camera phone - you get a mobile scanner/copy machine in your pocket, and you dont need to have your camera with you at all.
However, here qipit has one problem - the data costs - it sends 1-2MB.
I found one other program comombo, that compresses the photo and cleans it up on the phone directly. The end result is a pdf file that is only 50KB. Thats 20 times cheaper!
After that i email it and use standard ocr.
Written on 3/8/07 2:04 PM
Dear Anonymous,
File size is no problem if you have an unlimited data plan (very common these days). And as compression degrades quality, I'd rather pay a few cents in data comms rather than lose on the scan quality. Anyways, unless u r going to make a lot of scans a day, the added cost of data transfer is at worst marginal imho. I use www.qipit.com after testing all three and it wins by far in quality and usability. Oh and it does color scans as well -- unless im wrong, comombo only does bw, and scanr does color only for whiteboards. My 2 cts.
;-)
Written on 14/8/07 4:41 AM
@comombo anaonymous user - 200 picture messages for $4.99 on AT&T, unlimited is $19.99. Verizon includes unlimited picture messaging in all the plans they offer. If you are using picture messaging on one of these plans where is the high data cost?
Written on 24/10/07 9:17 AM