Editable text extraction

Question

greetings,
i have 8 years of daily data written in pencil. each day's dated data is merely one number, three digits at most with a decimal point. each paper has a month of entries (365 papers times 8).
how do i get the dated data into text if it's written in pencil (date/number)?
if i do text entry by hand, it will take me quite a while.
this whole project is to accomodate environmental protection.
does OS9.1 support this? I recall my original iMac (bonde ice) could mouse select text in the file called a clip (graphics file). that meant it somehow extracted it from a pure rasterized graphics file. It was OS8.1 factory installed in that bonde ice.
any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi, Hewo. Unless your handwriting varies much less from day to day and minute to minute than most people's does, the accuracy of OCR software in recognizing your handwritten data will be very low, meaning you'll not only have to take the considerable time needed to scan 8 x 365 pages, but you'll also have to proofread every character and correct many of them.
My cursive handwriting is atrocious — no one can read it. It's so bad I go weeks or months without using it at all. But I do exceptionally neat, legible and consistent architectural lettering, all uppercase, with unusual speed, so when I handwrite things, that's what I use. I usually do it in pencil; more rarely a black India-ink pen or black marker. My lettering varies more when I'm tired, rushed, or only writing for my own eyes, but even when I'm completely focused on making it legible and consistent, OCR software has a terrible time recognizing it: it just varies too much, especially when written in pencil. The best I ever did trying to scan it into my computer was about 75% accuracy — meaning that on average, one character in four was wrong or not recognized at all. It took longer to do the scanning, OCR, proofing and correcting than to retype the material from scratch. I tried OmniPage Pro, Read-It, and TextBridge Pro OCR software. It was a failure.
You might look into voice-recognition software instead, and read your data aloud into the computer.