OCR with OneNote 2019? Or alternative?

Judy in Texas · 3 Weeks Ago

I want to OCR a .jpg captured from computer screens and save the captures as a Word document. I can find instructions to do the conversions from a right-click of the image in OneNote 2016 and 2021 and other versions but can find no instructions for 2019.

The .jpg are images of my folders tree in Firefox. Firefox provides no way to search for a folder that you want to put a *new* link in.
(You can find the folder of an *existing* link just by going to the page and clicking on the star. Yet there are Firefox add-ins to do this....)

One Note is seems to be less consistent than I thought. If the image OCR capacity does not exist in 2019, can anyone recommend another strategy, such as a W10 OCR app that you like?

I need to preserve the formatting.I tried one online service and it reduced the outline format to a string and converted all of the outlining punctuation to cryptic codes.

Berton · 3 Weeks Ago

Just a comment, the 2016 version may work. Also, there's 2 versions of OneNote, the one that comes with Office and the one that comes with Windows 10.

I don't have Office on this Notebook. [The Outlook shown is the new one that replaces Mail.]

Callender · 3 Weeks Ago

You could use Yandex OCR. Upload an image and test.

Yandex Translate OCR

Here is an image of your post which is in Spanish. (I used google translate to visit this page)

OCR with OneNote 2019? Or alternative?-spanish.jpg

If I upload the image (.jpg) to Yandex and translate back to English I get:

OCR with OneNote 2019? Or alternative?-yandex-translate.jpg

If I download text extracted from the image via OCR I get:

OCR with OneNote 2019? Or alternative?-text.jpg

You could just copy and paste into Word.

There is no perfect OCR solution. They all make errors to some extent.

Callender · 3 Weeks Ago

Actually I don't know why I used translate. You can just use the OCR feature in English.

Wrong again. You translate into any other language (OCR Feature) then download the text in English.

Judy in Texas · 3 Weeks Ago

After reading the responses from Berton and Callender and trying one OCR solution, I understood that there is probably not an OCR solution that will preserve the formatting of the folders as Firefox displays them on my screen, and which is essential for me in reading the file.

So, I just used the Snipping tool (Yes, I know about the new one, but haven't installed it). I went through the folders display in Manage My Bookmarks, expanded all of the folders to see all of the subfolders, and snipped what turned out to be 12 images. I copied these images onto three landscape pages in Word and printed them out.

Now I can see that Knife Sharpening is a subfolder of Dec23, which is the time I was studying this (and selected a knife sharpener, then couldn't find where the folder was again). I can move that subfolder to the Act toolbar folder.

So thanks again to both of you. I solved my problem, will ask Firefox again to address this need (I will not be alone) and mark this thread Solved.

BTW, I am a librarian and want my resources organized. My Firefox bookmarks are my own attempt to capture the spirit of the Memex, as imagined by Vannevar Bush in 1945 and described in his article As We may Think. See Wikipedia for more, and a link to the article.