Have Anyone Used A Hand Held Scanner To Copy Text ?

[Walter Rego]

I have a very nice book on the Kongsberg Arsenal manufactured .45 automatic pistols licensed from Colt. The only problem is that it is in Norwegian. I can type the captions from photos for example, into one of the language translating websites and figure out what it says, even with the idiosyncrasies of those translating programs. I would like to translate larger sections of text, and have seen the small hand held scanners that can be used to scan text and then download to MSWord, which could then be cut and pasted into a translating site. Has anyone done something similar and can make any recommendations ? Thanks

 

[caseydog]

Anytime you scan a document the scanner will simply see a picture of the document , you want to take the text out of that picture as a copy/paste object. To do this will require OCR software (optical character recognition) , some scanners have it packaged , if not it is pretty pricey software.

The downside is that the software will need to have a language pack for Norwegian to recognize it as text, I don't know if that is available or not. Gives you some more info to check out anyway.

Ray

 

[cmore]

I had one a long time back, it didnt work very well.
It was only about 4 inches wide so could only scan one
column, at best. I believe that a new table top scanner today
would be cheaper than OCR software.
Good Luck

 

[Mortech]

AVOID hand scanners , in all the years I've been a computer tech (30+) I've never gotten one of them to work reliably . Your better of with a nice flat bed scanner , most come with decent OCR software packages now .

 

[Skeptic 9c]

Depending on your word processing program, MS Word has the option of adding a separate character set for Norwegian, check help follow instructions. I do NOT know if the OCR in MS Office will handle a foreign language even if the character set is loaded.
Geoff
Who figures this is an exercise for your Google Do.

 

[ChattanoogaPhil]

Speaking of OCR software... I have OmniPage Limited Edition 4.01 (3x 3.5 floppy) that worked great years ago... it'll be going in the trash today... if anyone wants be glad to mail to you.

 

[enfield]

Linux has a free scanner program called Kooka that has OCR capability. It works with my ancient HP Scanjet. Linux also has free language support for many, many languages.