System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by jimspoon
Dec 4, 2011 at 08:50 AM

Dr. Andus - this is a problem with so many parts! Consider just one of the parts - how to get information from a hard copy document or book. You mention the possibility of using a digital pen scanner for this purpose. This might be a good tool for extracting very short blocks of text - but not for larger blocks or whole pages. Why not capture whole pages at first, and then later on extract the shorter sections as needed? I’ve used my digital camera in the library to take pictures of book pages. Because of the positioning of the camera in relation to the book, there is perspective error, and because of the curvature of the spine, the lines are curved. The resulting images are poorly suited for OCR, but the newer versions of OCR software like Omnipage Pro do a remarkable job of correcting these problems and recognizing the text.

I also purchased a “magic wand” hand scanner - another thing you might consider - but the quality of the image depends on the steadiness of your hand as you move the wand across the page.

http://www.vupointsolutions.com/browse.php?cat=scanner