How to OCR handwritten notes and import them into specific sections of a coda Document?

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1

Hi,

I’m relatively new to Coda. I need to import handwritten notes on a paper template into Coda. The paper template has fields like “name”, “distance”, “organization” holding alphanumeric characters. There might be long text fields too. The field names are printed, but their contents are handwritten.

The idea is for a particular part of the note (e.g. “name” or “distance”) to be OCRd and then placed in a particular part of a Coda document (e.g. inside a table cell).

How can this be accomplished?. I know this might involve the use of other tools outside the Coda environment. I’m open to suggestions and workflows.

Thanks in advance,

2

I have not tested this but it seems like you can potentially use the OCR pack created by Rickard Abraham. Otherwise, a separate OCR tool and then use Make to start the flow.

So the flow with Coda pack would be:

  1. Take a photo of you handwritten note.
  2. Upload it to your Coda table
  3. Use Rickard OCR pack to get the text
  4. Use regular expression formula to extract the particular parts of your note for each Coda column.

The flow starting with Make would be:

  1. Take a photo of your handwritten note.
  2. Upload it to a watch folder that Make is monitoring.
  3. Make will pass that pdf to a OCR step and update the Coda table with the OCR’d text.
  4. Use regular expression formula to extract the particular parts of your note for each Coda column.

I hope this help to get you started.

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Thank you @boonshin! That sounds like a great flow for the OCR pack :+1: