Extract Handwritten Highlights to Excel
Budget: $15 – $25 AUD
I have a 160-page PDF that was scanned from a printed document. Certain words and short phrases were marked with a physical highlighter before it was scanned, so the highlights are now baked into the image rather than applied digitally.
The task is simple but detail-oriented: go through every page, locate each highlighted word or phrase, and copy it—exactly as it appears—into an Excel workbook. For each entry I also need the corresponding page number so I can trace it back later. If a highlight is smudged or unreadable, just note “unreadable” in the text column; otherwise leave spelling and punctuation untouched.
Deliverable
• One Excel file containing two columns: Page # and Highlighted Text.
Because the marks are handwritten highlights inside a scanned PDF, regular text-layer extraction won’t pick them up reliably, so expect a mix of careful visual review and any OCR tricks you find useful, followed by manual verification for 100 % accuracy. That’s all there is to it—clean, precise data ready for my analysis.
The task is simple but detail-oriented: go through every page, locate each highlighted word or phrase, and copy it—exactly as it appears—into an Excel workbook. For each entry I also need the corresponding page number so I can trace it back later. If a highlight is smudged or unreadable, just note “unreadable” in the text column; otherwise leave spelling and punctuation untouched.
Deliverable
• One Excel file containing two columns: Page # and Highlighted Text.
Because the marks are handwritten highlights inside a scanned PDF, regular text-layer extraction won’t pick them up reliably, so expect a mix of careful visual review and any OCR tricks you find useful, followed by manual verification for 100 % accuracy. That’s all there is to it—clean, precise data ready for my analysis.
Related categories:
Data Processing
Data Entry
Excel
PDF
Image Processing
Data Extraction
Data Management
Text Recognition