Windows Tip: OneNote OCR

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Occasionally I need to extract some text from an image, and typically you need
some form of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to do this. Since
I spend a lot of my time in the 2007 Office System family of products however,
it would be nice if there was some built-in functionality that could serve this
purpose. Well, it turns out that there is -- I just discovered that Microsoft
OneNote 2007 includes an OCR feature called Copy Text From Picture, and you
can use this method to copy text from all kinds of images including scanned
documents like the kind you typically find on a site like The Smoking Gun.

Here's what you can do. Say you find an image on a website that you want to
copy the text from. All you do is right-click on the image in Internet Explorer
and select Copy. Then go to a page in OneNote and paste the image onto the page.
Next, right-click on the image on your OneNote page and select Copy Text From
Picture. Now paste the contents of your clipboard to another OneNote page (or
into Word or any other application) and the text from your picture will appear.
Neat! From my experience though, the OCR capability of OneNote is somewhat limited.
For example, it works pretty accurately for images that contained scanned typed
text, but if you try it with scanned handwritten (or hand-printed) text it seems
to fall down completely -- even on my Tablet PC which can interpret my messy
handwriting. It also won't work if the contrast between text and background
and poor or possibly for certain color schemes as well.

Finally, like most OCR software, it can also interpret some non-text elements
as text, which can add a level of noise to an otherwise fairly clean OCR process.
But it can't be beat for the price if you're already a heavy OneNote user like
I am.