Using OCD to copy handwritten text into Times New Roman

I have a very large number of letters written by father during the war. My brother started typing them into Word but gave up. Is there software (OCD) which would enable me to scan the letters into Word in Times new roman or similar?

 

I have a Canoscan Lide220 scanner and a Canon PIXMA op8760 printer.

 

Sorry, a slip of the finger. It is an ip.

 

I did this very thing some years ago using Word. If the letters are on cursive then it's still going to be a task.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...document-7a07a4bd-aca5-4ec5-ba73-4589ac8b9eed

 

Thanks ddp and Sophocles. I will experiment with your suggestions.

 

My HP scanners give me the option to save a scan directly to Word or PDF. I looked at the manual for your 220 scanner and it looks like you can scan to PDF. If you have Adobe Reader X installed, I find that I can copy text from a PDF file directly into Word.

 

Yes, I can scan to PDF. I checked out "free" OCR converters and they all turned out to be expensive. I trialled one and the result was unintelligible (perhaps due to my handwriting). I have Adobe Reader installed but it is the free version. The cost of getting the version which converts a PDF to Word is much too expensive, especially as I cannot be sure that the result will be intelligible.

 

I have no difficulty in scanning documents a pdf. I had hoped that I could have handwritten pages turned into Times New Roman.

 

I don't understand. If you copy the text to Word, you can adjust the font size. Are you talking about changing the size of the lettering in the serif style the letters were written in?

 

The documents I wish to make Times New Roman are letters written in long hand by me 50 years ago. I would like to convert the hand written text to normal print format. Perhaps this isn't realistic?

 

I lost sight of that. I did find something that will do what you want but it's not free- https://www.pen-to-print.com/

 

Don't know if it will do the job however notepad xx is for coding etc so converting to another type should be child's play
https://notepad-plus-plus.org
Conversion to a pdf perhaps libra office or some other opensource i.e free office software.There are plugins available to convert.I use it to convert xml to pdf, never tried anything else. Comes as .exe or portable on windows Is cross platform i.e operating systems for linux & i believe mobile as well as mac,same with notepad

 

I wonder how Kafka has made out on this subject.

 

Probably not very well because I doubt that he's going to find an application that can copy cursive writing to text. Eve if it's in print it would have to be in precise block letters. I've converted written text from images to editable text but the images contained clear type lettering. He would probably do better if he could find a stenographer with good typing skills.

And that just gave me an idea. Why not use a speech to text software? He can read into a microphone and have his computer do the rest.

https://www.lifewire.com/best-speech-to-text-software-4688519

 

I gave him a link to an app that supposedly does the cursive to text.

I like your second idea.

 

The problem with cursive is everyone writes differently and I don't think OCR software is able to convert more than a few words at a time. Maybe you could help find some more speech to text options?