Using Google Drive/Docs for text recognition.

Awhile ago I found a recipe in Pat Callinan's 4X4 Adventure magazine that was relatively easy to cook, not just at home but out camping and the results were very, very tasty. It was a One Pot Jambalaya in issue 33, page 103. 

I wanted to be able to take this recipe with me when I travelled, so I needed it in a form I could easily use on my iPad which goes with me on all my travels and preferably have it in either my recipe manager of choice - Paprika or just in text form in a note. I have cooked this a couple of times using my cheap Aldi Thermal Pot and it worked quite well, you just have to leave it for a bit longer. 

Having a subscription to the magazine meant I could access it from either my iPad or via a web browser but the way this works is to simply provide an image of the whole page with no access to the text of the recipe, that I could copy and paste into another program. So the trick is to have the page fill the whole screen and take a screenshot (you'll just need to google for the appropriate way of doing it on your device of choice). 

You'll need a google account to proceed further, so either through the web based interface or the specific google drive app/program on your computing device of choice, copy the screenshot of the page you made before, into your google drive folder. 

Then you will need to access your google drive from a desktop computer using either a web browser or the specific google drive app for your desktop computer, note I used my Mac and the web browser interface but this should work on a windows computer as well. (I don't think this will work from an iOS or Android device) On the Mac right-click on the screenshot file and choose the option to Open in Google Docs. A new google docs window will pop up with the screenshot image on the first page and the recognized text on the following page. In the recipe I used, I was surprised by how well the text recognition worked, given there was a busy background image, with three different text boxes having odd shaped columns of text and even a couple of odd text fonts. 

I then simply formatted up the text and copied it into my recipe manager which then syncs to my iPad and I now have the recipe where I want it. This should also work with PDFs that are made up of scanned images of text. If you have lots of documents that you want to convert this is probably not the best way to do it but for the occasional document this works well and is a free option. 

Sent from my iPad