Turning a written draft into a printed draft?

onejontwo

I'm sure I read somewhere of a windows programme that enables a scanned hand written piece of work into a printed piece of work. In other words if I scanned something that has been written on an A4 piece of paper, it would save it and convert it to the relevant font so this can then be printed off for university work etc. Or is this just wishful thinking?

fwor

Known as Optical Character Recognition. Some scanner suppliers (e.g. Canon, Lexmark) bundle a version with their products.

Examples: Abbyy - which Lexmark used to supply, and Omni-Page which Canon use.

I've used the latter and it works fairly well with individually written characters (which is how I usually write) but completely useless for joined-up writing!

I should add that it's almost impossible to get reliable results with any of them with handwriting, because nobody writes characters accurately or consistently. All the ones I've seen are really designed for scanning printed work.

neilwoods

Yeah OCR is pretty useless for joined up handwriting, even struggle's with individual written characters depending on the person's writing. OCR is best for using on typed documents.

If it is just a single page, then just type it in.