gHacks technology news » scan-text http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:22:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Find and Replace text across multiple documents http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/22/find-and-replace-text-across-multiple-documents/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/22/find-and-replace-text-across-multiple-documents/#comments Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:24:13 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/22/find-and-replace-text-across-multiple-documents/ A colleague of mine build a static html website a few years ago. He slowly but steadily created hundreds of html pages which was great for him because he could simply use one already finished file as a template for a new one. It did however pose a problem as well. Updating information across all files was very time consuming. Think of extending the copyright notice each year, adding advertisement to the websites or changing the navigation.

What he obviously needs is a program that can find and replace text across multiple documents. Ideally it would be a software that would be easy to use and would require just a few clicks to achieve the desired results. One of the applications that can deliver a speedy way of replacing text across multiple documents is Text Crawler.

Ideally you only need to fill out the old and new text, the location of the documents and the type of documents that you want to change. Text Crawler scans all documents of that type for the phrase that you have entered and displays all occurrences in a list that contains the file name and location as well as the line in the document with the match.

find replace text

The text is only replaced in files checked by the user. Some of the supported file types are txt, log, php, htm, css and ini. What I like is the option to create backup files before replacing the text in the documents and support for Regular Expressions. A great feature is the Regular Expression Tester that allows you to load a text file and test if the regular expression is replacing the text correctly.

The process itself is very fast, takes just a short time to replace the text in the selected documents.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/03/22/find-and-replace-text-across-multiple-documents/feed/ 5 Capture image and convert it to text http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/12/capture-image-and-convert-it-to-text/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/12/capture-image-and-convert-it-to-text/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:42:43 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/12/capture-image-and-convert-it-to-text/ I was not really sure how to name the title of this article. Jocr is a freeware that makes it possible to capture to capture a set region, a window or a full screen image in Windows and use character recognition to write the text of the image into a notepad file. The only prerequisite as far as I can tell is – unfortunately – a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 or newer with Microsoft Office Document Imaging installed which you can find under the Office Tools tab of the installation CD. The language that you are using has to be supported by Microsoft Office Document Imaging, about 20 are supported next to English of course.

jocr character recognitionUsing Jocr is actually a pretty straightforward process. Choose if you want to capture a region, window or desktop and use the mouse to draw the region or to highlight a window that should be captured. It is not necessary to select something if you choose to capture the whole desktop of course. A preview of the captured image will be shown in Jocr and all that is left to be done is to click on recognize to start the character recognition.

Results are actually pretty good. They are not perfect however and you need to manually edit them for errors but the recognition rate is astounding for a freeware. The main use that I can foresee for this software would be to capture text from files that can not be copied and use Jocr to have an editable version of the text.

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