Free Resources from the Net for EVERY Learner

After a long blogging silence, I’m back with a free resource that I’m especially excited about.  I’ve discovered an effective free option for turning scanned text into digital text that can then be used with a wide range of study tools,  including text-to-speech.  All previous attempts to create useful digital text from the PDF files  made with standard flatbed scanners and their OCR software have yielded disappointing results.  The results with ScannedPDFtoWord aren’t perfect, but they are very very good.

ScannedPDFtoWord does exactly what its name implies.  It converts scanned PDF documents to Microsoft Word (.doc) files.  The online conversion is quick, and the quality of the text is excellent when opened in Word.  The conversion process could hardly be easier, and registration isn’t even required.

You simply upload the scanned PDF file and give an email address where you can download the converted file.  Here’s what the user interface looks like.

Although the graphics were missing, once opened in MS Word the converted files retained original formatting.  I was able to edit the scanned text easily.  For example, there was no problem in selecting the entire document and changing the font.  There were almost no errors that needed to be corrected in the scanned document.

I was especially pleased to confirm that WordTalk worked flawlessly with the scanned text.  WordTalk is the versatile free add-on for MS Word that provides text-to-speech, a talking spell checker, conversion of text to  MP3 audio format,  etc. There are, of course, numerous other study tools built into MS Word that are available to a learner once a document has been scanned into MS Word via ScannedPDFtoWord.

Below is a sample of scanned text that was converted by ScannedPDFtoWord and opened in MS Word.  I’ve highlighted the only errors I could find–the ‘f’ dropped from the word ‘first’ and the two dates, where the number 1 at the beginning of both dates was converted as the capital letter I.  As I said at the outset, this isn’t perfect; but I think it’s very very good.