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I have just done a search on Google as to how I would convert a scanned document (of a typescript) into a document that would recognize the characters just like any other Word document. But ofcourse I went and forgot that I am using Ubuntu and not Windows. So is it still possible somehow to do the same on Ubuntu is what I am wondering. I would really appreciate any help.

Thank you.

2 Answers 2

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Tesseract is one option that worked great for me!

I used it as follows:

Install it, if you don't have it with:

 sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr

Then:

  • Convert the .JPG scanned file to .tif (this is the format Tesseract
    requires). This is done with ImageMagick as follows:

    convert foo.JPG foo.tif

  • Now simply let Tesseract do it's magic:

    tesseract foo.tif foo (will save output to foo.txt)

I recently had to convert an old manual with multiple(36) pages to something digital. I whipped up a BASH script to do it.

Code here:

#!/bin/bash
# makeDoc.sh
# Turn a set of scanned JPG pages into a single document file.
# Requires the ImageMagick and Tesseract packages.
# Author: Fred Fury 

echo "makeDoc.sh"
echo "Convert a set of scanned JPG pages into a single document file."
echo "Starting up..."
for i in {01..36}
do
    echo "converting $i.JPG to $i.tif..."
    bash -c "convert $i.JPG $i.tif"     # Convert the file to tesseract usable format
    bash -c "tesseract $i.tif $i &>-"   # Convert the tif to txt
done
echo "Merging files into Output.doc"    
bash -c "cat *.txt > Output.doc"        # Merge all the generated txt files into a single file
echo "Done."

Also check out this page for some other solutions: What's the best, simplest OCR solution? This is where I found tesseract.

Hope that helps!

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I had a similar problem to this a while ago. Try uploading the file to online-convert.com. It will take a while, but the webapp can handle just about any format. Good luck!

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  • THAT'S AMAZING!!!! Thank you SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much!!!!!!!!!! MWAH!!!!
    – user167210
    Jul 31, 2013 at 13:11
  • @KapMarvin Please don't shout.
    – user423626
    Apr 19, 2016 at 11:45

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