What is a good handwriting recognition software?

I bought a Livescribe pen which records whatever I write (and say).

However, it can only give me pdf versions of what I wrote. Using MyScript (an paid extension) I can have it convert my handwritten notes to digital text.

But it turns out it doesn't like Dutch very much and isn't working perfect.

So my question is: does anyone know of a handwriting recognition software that can convert my pdf files to digital text?

Preferably free and for Windows 7.

alt text

Ivo Flipse

Posted 2009-08-13T07:11:17.447

Reputation: 24 054

BTW any solution that works on scanned, handwritten documents is welcome too – Ivo Flipse – 2009-08-13T07:16:50.930

You should add a "OCR" tag to this question. – Yuval – 2009-08-13T07:51:07.677

There you go! ;-) – Ivo Flipse – 2009-08-13T07:54:54.580

I tried some of the softwares mentioned on Wikipedia, but none of them were able to create a readable sentence. – Ivo Flipse – 2009-08-13T11:25:21.030

I suggest you contact MyScript's support and send them samples of your Dutch handwriting which are badly recognized. – Gregory Pakosz – 2009-12-08T16:59:13.870

Answers

I don't have much experience with these applications, but you can take a look at this list and try out some of them.

Yuval

Posted 2009-08-13T07:11:17.447

Reputation: 2 022

I tried the OCR softwares, but none of them worked for me sadly. But it was what I was looking for – Ivo Flipse – 2009-08-24T09:25:40.520

Tesseract.

From Wikipedia:

It was originally developed as proprietary software at Hewlett-Packard between 1985 until 1995. After ten years without any development taking place, Hewlett Packard and UNLV released it as open source in 2005. Tesseract is currently developed by Google and released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Tesseract is considered one of the most accurate free software OCR engines currently available

The drawback is that it only processes tiff file, maybe you can use other convertor to convert pdf to tiff and let Tesseract does the job.

Graviton

Posted 2009-08-13T07:11:17.447

Reputation: 5 006

I find that gimagereader does I good job as a GUI for tesseract. link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimagereader/

– starbeamrainbowlabs – 2013-10-07T15:41:02.123

Handwriting is very hard to convert after the fact, there is a digital ink format that captures the time related portion of the info, which makes it doable. Good luck, write in English (larger and thus more money spent on development)? It is a hard problem.

Ronald Pottol

Posted 2009-08-13T07:11:17.447

Reputation: 641