For anyone who’s interested, this is a short description of the process I’ve used to convert the Max Fatchen newspaper clippings to WordPress posts.
I’ve used only tools that I had or that were available as open-source or for free. MS Word is probably the most expensive if you don’t already have it—but Google Docs, or Libre Office (Write?) or even Notepad will do the job perfectly well. In truth, you could forego that stage completely and drop text directly into WordPress if you wanted; however I see value in keeping the “source” files, particularly as some of them do need a fair bit of editing.
Process
- Photograph the article/clipping in good, even light against a fairly plain background using a high-res camera. I used the one in my Samsung S22. Try to get the pic reasonably square and without significant shadows or “flare”.
- Use Gimp to crop, straighten and otherwise manipulate the image to clean it up and make the text as clear and sharp as is possible. I tended to use crop, rotate and perspective adjust a fair bit, with occasional brightness/contrast tweaks (usually to some parts of the image, say where there was a shadow or similar).
- Save the image as either JPG or PNG with the least reduction in quality, then upload to Google Photos.
- Right-click the picture in Photos and select “Search image with Google”, which opens Google Lens in a sidebar.
- Click (Text), then [Select all text], then (Copy)—this OCRs the text and copies it to the Windows clipboard.
- Paste the text into your word processor or text editor of choice; as above I used Word because I had it and am familiar with it.
- Read the article from the image and edit the text to accurately reflect it. I found that some pieces needed next-to-no work, others took up to an hour or so. I also found that I could sometimes improve the results by selecting parts of an image in Step 4 above. Obviously, the better the readability of the text, the more accurate the output.
- Once editing is complete, copy/paste the text into WordPress: JOB DONE 🙂
As I’ve noted, this is what worked for me, your milage may vary!