Digitizing a hard copy book manuscript

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In the late 1980s, I wrote a novel on a Kaypro 64 portable computer and saved my work on 5 1/4″ floppy disks. I printed a hard copy using an Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer to share with my writer’s group. I gave the Kaypro to my daughter in 1992 when she went off to college. I don’t think she ever used it. I have no idea what happened to the floppy disks. I may have transferred the data to a 3 1/2″ floppy; I don’t remember. Fortunately, I tossed the hard copy in a file drawer. It remained there for over thirty years.

A couple of years ago, I took it out and read it. Like a lot of my old writing, the quality surprised me. I might have something here, I thought. Don’t get me wrong; it needed some work. Before I could get into the editing, I had to convert it from hard copy to digital. That presented a challenge.

The hard copy was a poor candidate for scanning and OCR conversion to digital. The 9-pin dot matrix output a low resolution font under the best of circumstances. The ribbon in the printer had little ink left on it. If the printing had been darker and sharper, I would have made a copy of it and sent it to be digitized by a service. I did that with a paperback book I published in 1996 for which I had lost my digital copy. It cost me $25.

I discarded the option of re-typing the manuscript into my computer after one page. I am not a proficient typist and didn’t want to pay one. That left do-it-yourself scanning and OCR conversion. I used my old Cannon Lide scanner attached to a Windows 7 Dell desktop and FreeOCR.

The scanner doesn’t have an automatic document feeder. I scan one page at a time, then use the OCR to convert to digital. The process correctly reads about 70% of the characters. I then save as an RTF and make deletions and corrections.

It is a tedious process, but I am making progress. The novel is 75,000 words long with 30 chapters. I am currently working on Chapter 19.

I’ll provide updates as I make further progress.

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