A few days ago I read a contribution by Vera in which she told us that she scanned passages from books and imported them into LingQ as lessons. I have tried scanning a couple of pages but have only been able to make the file into a PDF file. I remember that a couple of years ago I was able to scan and import into word as a word text. This text I was able to work with word-by-word. This is not possible with a PDF file.
Vera, or anyone else: How can I use a scanner now so that I can import the text into LingQ? Do I need a special programme?
Hi rae, there are several programs that can do this.
I use “Microsoft Office Document Scanning” which comes with MS Office. There are better ones but that was available for me without paying extra money I can choose which language I want to scan for the languages that are interesting for me (English and French at the moment). I wrote a script that cleaned up some formating so that the word texts was fine. Plain text works the best. The text books of my daughter comes with a lot of pictures and boxes. In these cases I have more work to get a proper text.
I’ve only the German version of the program that came with my scanner. So this program didn’t work for me.
Thanks Vera. I think that was how I did it in the past.
Unfortunately the document scanning program does not seen to come with the versions of MS Office that I am using at present. I use MS Office 2010 (for PC) or MS Office 2011 (for Macintosh). These are both the Home versions. I will also try the computer system at the school where I work, though at the moment I cannot log into the system. Perhaps that will work.
I use ABBYY FineReader. It’s not free, but it has become better and better with the years, so now I can scan documents in Polish almost without spelling mistakes. I recommend it.
I found the newest version of Abbyy FineReader (Version 11) costs about 100 Euros. But Version 9 which should work for you costs only 16 Euro (at Amazon.de). Maybe you should consider to bay an old version if it is the same in your country.
If you need to OCR just a few pages per day, you could use this web-version of FineReader: http://finereader.abbyyonline.com (it’s also possible to buy extra pages there if you exceed the day limit).
There are some free OCR features in Google Documents as well, as far as I remember.
I can choose which language I want to scan for the languages that are interesting for me (English and French at the moment). I wrote a script that cleaned up some formating so that the word texts was fine. Plain text works the best. The text books of my daughter comes with a lot of pictures and boxes. In these cases I have more work to get a proper text.