stuart-the-legend
asked on
Transposing text from a scanned document
G'day All,
I have to build an application that will allow a user to take a scanned document and transpose the text on the document into a structured format. The scanned document will be a hand-written survey form. I have to devise a way to allow the user to easily navigate through the document (through each of the form fields) and re-type the handwritten text. Basically the user would "tab" to each of the fields and the tabbing process would change the display to show the corresponding field text, and zoom the document as appropriate so the user can easily read the text. Given that I know the exact structure of the survey form, I was thinking of scanning the document as a PDF and programmatically adding bookmarks at runtime (using iText), or scanning as a TIFF and zooming to a particular X,Y coordinate.
Can anyone offer any further suggestions as to how I might accomplish this task? I'm not looking for code, rather some high-level ideas and possibly some Java libraries that may help. Thanks very much.
I have to build an application that will allow a user to take a scanned document and transpose the text on the document into a structured format. The scanned document will be a hand-written survey form. I have to devise a way to allow the user to easily navigate through the document (through each of the form fields) and re-type the handwritten text. Basically the user would "tab" to each of the fields and the tabbing process would change the display to show the corresponding field text, and zoom the document as appropriate so the user can easily read the text. Given that I know the exact structure of the survey form, I was thinking of scanning the document as a PDF and programmatically adding bookmarks at runtime (using iText), or scanning as a TIFF and zooming to a particular X,Y coordinate.
Can anyone offer any further suggestions as to how I might accomplish this task? I'm not looking for code, rather some high-level ideas and possibly some Java libraries that may help. Thanks very much.
ASKER
Absolutely. My scanner will do that for me now.
Yes, but i mean as a pdf *document*. Producing a pdf file is trivial - it'd be an image essentially
ASKER
Ah, sorry, misunderstood you. Yes, the PDF basically contains an image representation of the scanned form. I have toyed with idea of OCR'ing the form during the scan process, but I don't think the technology is capable of dealing with hand-written script (not if my handwriting is anything to go by).
I don't see how you can do anything at all programmatically *unless* you can OCR it ...
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