Digi-quest

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Published: 12:00am, 14 Sep 2008Updated: 4:18pm, 8 May 2015

I want to put documents and certain passages of books in my computer but I'm not sure how to do it. Obviously, I need a scanner and some special software. Will this be expensive?

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DQ: You require optical character recognition (OCR) software. This electronically translates images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into text that can be edited on a computer. There are quite a lot of OCR programs available, with applications designed to work on Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems. Some of these are free while other applications can cost up to several hundred US dollars.

Probably the best known OCR tool is a high-end product from Nuance Communications called OmniPage (www.nuance.com/omnipage). It runs on both Windows and Mac machines. But with a price tag of about US$500, it is not cheap. Google has put some money behind a Linux-based OCR system called OCRopus (code. google.com/p/ocropus). If you are a brave software code writer, you can try to use it.

Another possibility is to scan some pages and send these to a site that does the OCR work. Still, that is unlikely to be a good solution if you have a lot of text.

You will need a decent scanner that can handle a minimum of 300 dots-per-inch resolution. If you have a lot of loose pages, your scanner must have a sheet feeder.