So, usually I put them side by side like this and start proofing:īut proofing text that’s already been rendered by a program that knows a much wider range of words than I do is so much quicker than trying to figure it out on my own. Now, as you can see … there’s some errors in there.
So, usually what I do is copy and paste it into a new document, enlarge it, and choose a more attractive font (under “more fonts” you can select Arabic as the language and have your pick). Why, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say it’s Arabic! You see that microscopic text at the bottom? Let’s zoom in a bit. In the words of Parker Posey from the otherwise forgettable “Superman Returns” (2006), “Gee, Lex. When you open your new Google doc (it’ll happen automatically), you’ll see this. I mean, you can, but the part that you really want to happen next - the OCR magic! - doesn’t happen if you do that. You cannot open a blank Google Doc and insert the image. In the popup menu, select “Open with > Google Docs” Right click on the first image you want to work with.This is important: open Google Drive, not Google Docs.It’s a regular old JPG called, inventively, “November 27-01.jpg” because I’m working with the issue from November 27 1918, and it’s the first image. Take a snip of your document - here’s what the snip I’m working with looks like: Since I’m working with a newspaper, I do this one column at a time. Open your document and get it on the screen.
( note: if you’re working with a document where the text is already in one column–like a letter or printed report–you can skip this step.)
#Google ocr tool windows 10
Let’s take this column I’ve been working on out of Al-Muqattam, an Egyptian newspaper, from 1918.
My productivity has gone up substantially. It’s a little cumbersome, but I’ve been using it to produce translations of newspaper articles in about as much time as it would normally take me to try to skim them. I discovered by accident that Google Docs has the holy grail for people who work with Arabic and Persian: Optical Character Recognition.