In a few weeks time I’ll be speaking at Hathern Baptist. Sermons are working through themes from Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer and I’ve been sent photos of the relevant pages to get me started. It would be easier though if I had the text as text…

I did a quick search and it turns out Microsoft OneNote, which I have as part of my Office365 subscription, has a built in tool for optical character recognition (OCR). Once you have loaded the photos into OneNote, you can right click them and select “copy text from picture”. It is a long time since I last used OCR and I am pleased to find that it has greatly improved in the meanwhile. I still had to do a little bit of editing but it was quicker than typing from scratch. Given that the photos had a strong colour cast, showed pages that were bent back as the page was held open and there were sections highlighting, I’d go as far as to say that I was impressed.

I’m also pleased to find that JMC mentions a couple of the passages I had already been considering (Jesus eating with Zacchaeus and Jesus having a reputation as a “winebibber” (KJV version – JMC just sticks with “glutton and drunkard” from more modern translations). Time to start forming my thoughts a bit more.