Thanks Ted for both of your posts. Here is some more info. I cannot convert most of the fields to multiple choice inputs. The reason is that many of these fields are things like last name, first name, Date of birth, mailing addresses -- things that truly require writing by hand.
> I found an open source software program for this and built a system around it Can you share this open source software? I like to give it a try. The problem that I am facing so far. I use a mediocre Android phone to scan/convert the form into a PDF (I use Adobe Scan app) just as a test. Then I tried tesseract or some python libs to recognize the words (both the printed questions on the form as well as hand-writing words). Both tesseract or the python libs can recognize the printed questions but handle very poorly on the hand-writing words. I suspect maybe my phone camera is not "good enough" even though it is advertised to be 50MP. On Tue, Nov 4, 2025 at 6:02 AM Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]> wrote: > Followup on the "handwritten forms" > > If you are able to convert these forms into a multiple-choice form that > people fill in boxes by hand, instead of writing actual words on them, I can > Tell you how to convert these into actual data output. At my office we > have this customer satisfaction survey thing that we do periodically, and > For a zillion unrelated reasons it has to be handed out on paper. The > department doing it was wringing their hands over this as it would take > Hours and hours and hours for some poor soul to go through all of the > forms and input the results into a spreadsheet. > > I looked into commercial products that do this - and there's only 1 > company out there that sells software nowadays for this - Tungsten > Automation. These turkeys have been spending the last decade buying up > every company in the "hybrid paper workflows" market and they now have a > complete monopoly on it - and literally they sell complete systems, they no > longer sell standalone software that does forms conversions. Pricing is > quote-only and it's in the low 5 figures. > > I found an open source software program for this and built a system around > it - so now, they just feed the 300 or so paper surveys into the hopper in > a scanner like what I just linked to, and all the resulting PDF's get fed > into the system and the data is then loaded into a MariaDB database. I > then took their Excel spreadsheet and converted it into a front end using > the ODBC drivers for MariaDB. Works slick saves hours of drudgery. > > Anyway, this is only good for multiple choice click box forms that people > fill out by hand. For OCR of cursive or handwritten printing - good effing > luck. > > Ted > > -----Original Message----- > From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of VY > Sent: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 4:47 AM > To: General Linux/UNIX discussion and help, civil and on-topic < > [email protected]> > Subject: [PLUG] document scanner > > Dear All > > I am looking for a good document scanner that is Linux compatible. Better > yet if it is Raspberry Pi compatible. > > I have a bunch of forms that have hand writing on them. I will be getting > them on a regular basis and I like to scan them and convert them to > high-resolution PDFs. > > Any pointer for such a scanner is much appreciated. > > -Vincent > >
