One piece of software I use extensively, but not mentioned above, is AABBY Fine Reader Pro. That’s another ideal solution–assuming you have $249 to drop on Final Draft.
Once you have that, you can “Save As” a Word doc or docx–and keep the formatting. At that point, Final Draft can take over and do an excellent draft of giving you a formatted Final Draft file (.fdr).
Happily, the folks at Google, who want to digitize every text on the face of the earth, are deeply into research on this as we sleep, so you can expect OCR to improve noticeably over the next few years.įor playwrights using Final Draft, the key is getting a good PDF file. This is why you should try to start with a totally clean print job (use a lazer printer, if possible) and a non-Seraph font. The slightest typographical irregularity can make a scan spin off into irregularity–old newsprint is an absolute nightmare. OCR, being a form of object recognition, is one of the toughest challenges a computer can face. You’ll either have to own a Windows computer, know someone who does, or have Windows installed on a partition of your Mac’s hard drive, but compared to coughing up $449, the extra trouble may be worth it. For Windows, Omnipage comes in the usual array of cheaper versions–from $49 to $149 and up–but even with the Windows limitation, Omnipage gets my vote for the software of choice.
Probably the best solution of all, if you don’t mind learning how to use it, is OmniPage Pro X, even pricier, for the Mac, at $499. That’s pretty slick, and almost effortless–assuming you already own Final Draft or have $249 to drop. The other is Final Draft.įinal Draft can take over and do an excellent draft of giving you a formatted Final Draft file (.fdr) that you can “Save As” a Word doc or docx–keeping the original FD formatting. One is Adobe Acrobat (not Adobe Reader, mind you). I’ll mention, for the record, a couple of “Cadillac” OCR mentions. Also: a web based service called PDF Converter with have various membership levels. I haven’t used it, but at $29.95 it’s certainly worth a try. But for your MacBook Pro, running OS X, the pickin’s are slimmer. In Windows, there are a variety of options. Because software for OCR (optical character recognition) costs a lot of money.īut happily shareware developers are coming up with cheaper solutions. PDF is technically an image format, so turning it into editable text (a doc or docx file) is like cramming the square peg into a round hole. After the save, select it, click Print, and when the Print Menu comes up, look for a “Save as PDF” option (on any computer running OS X, it will always be there). Save your scan as a multi-page, high-quality image–a. At BestBuy or wherever, request a scanner known to “see” text pretty well–but really, any of today’s scanners can credibly digitize your old stuff as an image file. It would be even better if the scanner would save the files in a form that could be edited, but that’s less important than just getting them into digital form.” I want to find a scanner that can EASILY and EFFICIENTLY connect to my Macbook Pro, which will turn those old manuscripts into pdf files to be saved digitally. Piles of Typed Manuscripts “I have an old pile of typed manuscripts that were never saved on a computer.