NOTE: Newsletter readers report that ABBYY TextGrabber only works with the iPhone 4 or 3GS, not the iPod Touch or the iPad.  I didn't have an iPod Touch available to me so I tested ABBYY TextGrabber with an iPhone 4. I like it so well that I am keeping the program.

The Process

 Actually, through a series of iPhones I have owned, I have been using the camera in my iPhone to take pictures of documents for years. The built-in camera works rather well at snapping pictures of all sorts of documents although it doesn't have the high resolution of a dedicated desktop scanner. Still, the resolution of the latest iPhone 4 is sufficient for most of my purposes.

For example, click on the image to the right to see a picture I took with my iPhone 4 from the History and Genealogy of the Eastman Family of America published in 1901 by Guy S. Rix. If you click on the small image to the right, you will soon  see a full-size copy of the image that I snapped with the iPhone camera. Note that it is rather good resolution at 1,936 by 2,592 pixels, resulting in a 1.8 megabyte file.

The picture looks good to the human eye. It does have a few characteristics, however, that are typical of genealogy books. First, the camera was not perfectly vertical in relationship to the text when I snapped the picture, so the text is slightly slanted. This is typical of using a handheld camera to take pictures of pages in a book. It is almost impossible to align a handheld camera exactly vertically in relation to the book. That won't bother the human eye, but might make a big difference when converting the text by OCR technology. (I'll write more about OCR a bit later in this article.)

Next, there are "extra marks" on the page. Someone wrote a checkmark above and to the left of the word "John" in the first paragraph of text, just below the page title. Also look at the ninth line (counting the title as a line). Note the smudge in front of the letter "e" in "each of his children."

Next, in the middle of the page, someone crossed out the month of "Aug." and wrote in "Oct."

Another problem is the font sizes. At least this page has all the text in a serif font, but the superscript numbers at the end of each child's name will be difficult for a computer to interpret easily.

All in all, this picture looks rather "clean" although I do see one extra speck above the word "MASS." in the page title. Many pictures of genealogy books often have a lot more speckles, smudges, and dots.