OneNote is good for a lot of things–like taking notes–but did you know that you can also use it as a quick & dirty OCR? It’s a snap to use, too. Just copy an image from the clipboard onto a OneNote page, then right-click and choose Copy Text from Picture.
OneNote works its magic and copies the text it finds to the clipboard. Here’s what the image above produces:
File Edit Format View I love text! Texty, text, text! Untitled - Help Notepad Ln2, Col
You can see that it’s far from perfect. I’m not sure why “Untitled -” and “Notepad” aren’t together or why they’re not at the top. It also didn’t do a great job with the text in the status bar, reading Ln 2, Col 19 as Ln2, Col. But it did a good job with the meaty part that I’d actually care about.
Let’s try a more complicated example. Behold, a screen-grab of the lipsum.com Lorem Ipsum generator homepage!
This image has a little bit of everything. There are letters, numbers, columns, different fonts and sizes, and even a background with words! Here’s what OneNote gives us:
Lorevn Ipsuvn "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem 'psum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adpsci vellt 'There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum IS simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry Lorem psum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the ISOOs, when an unknown printer took a galley of type scrambled t to make a type specimen boobc It has survwed not only fwe centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem psum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus ageMaker including versions of Lorem Where Does it come from? Contrary to popular belief, Lorem psum is not simply random text It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in V'rgnia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur from a Lorem psum passage, and gong through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source Lorem psum comes from sections UllY32 and IA1133 of "de Finibus aonorum et Malorum- (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance The first line of LÆrem psum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet comes from a line in section 32 The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the ISOOs is reproduced below for those interested Sections T1032 and IAIY33 from "de Finibus aonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by Rackham Why Do we use it? It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout The point of using Lorem psum is that t has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters as opposed to using 'Content here, content here making it look like readable Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem psum as their default model text and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still 'n their infancy Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like) Where can I get some? There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the mayorty have suffered alteration In some form, by Injected humour, or randomised words which dom look even slightly believable If you are going to use a passage of Lorem psum, you need to be sure there ism anything embarrassing hidden n the middle of text All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined wth a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem psum which looks reasonable The generated Lorem psum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc paragraphs by tes Start with 'Lorem ips um dolor sit Generate Lorem Ipsum
Okay, pretty good. It did an admirable job of detecting the paragraphs and columns. Most of the words came out fine, but there were problems with numbers (1500s read as ISOOs) like we saw with the simple Notepad example. There were a lot of small typos (reados?), like dropped periods or a missing letter here and there. The takeaway here is that any decent amount of text that you care about should be proofread. If you’re too lazy for proofreading, you might be able to clean it up a bit by pasting into Word and using its spelling and grammar checking.
Despite its flaws, it’s a really fast, really easy way to OCR just about anything you can get on your computer screen. Take a screenshot using Snipping Tool or something better, paste it into OneNote, and OCR that mamma jamma!
adamprescott.net 