For past many decades, people have been working all over the world to convert older books, journals, newspapers, and various other records into digital format. Millions of books and newspapers have been scanned and are now available online.
While scanning does turn the old paper records into electronic format, the records can still not be searched based on the keywords unless someone transcribes them into text format. While OCR software can do a lot of things, it sometimes fails to recognize older hand written records. OCR also fails because the older record scans include pale or damaged paper.
There is a special transcription software called GenScriber that can be used to transcribe text from old and handwritten scans. The software has special tools that make it easy to read through very old scans. We can open the scanned images and then use a number of filters to make the text readable.
It comes with many different filters such as making the scans greyscale, turn the picture into negative colors, changing the contrast, sharpness and tint of the picture. There is a special text marker tool which can show you which part of the scanned document you are transcribing.
After opening the scanned document image in GenScriber, you can type in the text editor given in the lower part of its window. The text editor has all the tools that you would find in any standard text editor. It is actually a rich text editor such as Wordpad.
However, if the scanned document contains tables or tabulated records of some kind, then you can also switch to the spreadsheet data entry editor. It looks exactly like Microsoft Excel and we can enter tabulated items much easily. The data can then be saved into many different file formats such as TXT, PDF, CSV.
You can download GenScriber from http://www.genscriber.com/.