Translate Scanned Recipes in Acrobat Pro

[cedric.diggory]

Hey all. I have a thick 3-ring binder sitting on my desk full of my late Mother's best recipes (mmmm... analog). These are important to me - like the culinary story of my childhood.

I have a scanner and want to digitize the recipes for a few reasons:

1. I want to store them in the cloud so they can't be lost to damage or wear

2. I want to reformat them into a family cookbook for my kids

3. I want to be able to index and search them quickly

The challenges are thus:

1. Some of them are handwritten, some are typed

2. Some are in English, some are in German

3. Some use imperial measurement units, some use metric units

If I could waive a magic wand (*ahem*.. isn't this what AI is supposed to be?) I would scan all of the documents and some magic software would translate them, convert the units, and output them into OCR-friendly PDFs or similar. I have an annual subscription to Acrobat Pro so I was hoping to start here, but I'm open to ideas.

[gary_sc]

Hi, @cedric.diggory, in a word, no, and a little bit of yes. 

The easiest way for you to do this is not with a magic wand but with a checkbook and have someone else do it (and no, I have no suggestions for you to do this).

Here's the deal: There is no known way to turn handwritten notes into accurate text. With typewritten notes, that is much easier, but accuracy is not 100% due to the quality of the typewriter (which can vary). (Personal note: my mom typed out a bunch of family history. I wanted to capture this, so I scanned and OCRed it. But, due to her poor typing and the sad fact that the platin kept on slipping (causing the lines of text to slant), there were sections where it was easier and faster to retype. Unfortunately, just plan on retyping the handwritten sections.

Regarding storage in the clouds, that's easy: select a cloud service (such as DropBox) and store the contents up there.

The person doing this will have to do the translation from German into English (or English into German) as well as any conversion from metric into Imperial (or Imperial into metric). (Note: my wife does a lot of baking, and a number of cookbooks have been making those conversions as well. There are subtleties involved in this conversion to make things easier for the user.)

As far as indexing to find things. The first thing is to organize them: Baking is one section; dinner items are another, beef, pork, and chicken and subdivisions; stewing, roasting, and braising are more. Simply put, better organizing makes it much easier for most people to find things. Look at ANY cookbook and model the structure they have. There's a reason why cookbooks are all structured the same — it works.

If you bring all of your final results into an application such as InDesign, you can generate a Table of Contents and an Index. While not necessarily easy, it's much easier than creating a Table of Contents (only) in Acrobat. 

I suggest that you break this up to make it a family process: After scanning and OCRing, convert the documents into MS Word so that they can easily be edited and corrected (this really needs to be done). Once processed, then they can be converted back into PDFs for posting. There does need to be one person doing the final assembly.

Sadly, this is not a "couple of clicks and it's done" project. Nonetheless, this will be a fabulous gift to your family and future generations. 

A number of years ago, I wrote this blog on scanning for Adobe. It may give you some ideas and help.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/scanning-clean-searchable-pdfs/m-p/4785...