Quickly Adding Printed Text

If you need to copy a lot of text from printed sources a scanning pen can be a good investment. Just scan across a line of text in a book or article. When you lift the scanning pen, the scanner's software automatically performs optical character recognition (OCR) to change the scanned image into editable text. This is an imperfect process, and it depends on the quality of the print (newspaper is particularly difficult to scan) as well as how smoothly you scan the pen. The scanned text is then inserted in Citavi.

You can use any corded scanning pen. Scanning pens with internal memory are more difficult to use.

If you have larger amounts of text to scan, a flatbed scanner or document scanner can make more sense. The scan faster and with fewer errors. The downside is that you generally scan by the page even if you only need one sentence.

If you only need to scan now and then, you can also use a digital camera or the camera on your smartphone with OCR software.

Another alternative to typing is speech recognition software. Windows Vista and later include basic speech recognition software, though for frequent use you may want to consider commercial speech recognition software such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. However, speech recognition software requires you to "train" the software to recognize your voice's peculiarities. You should expect to spend approximately one hour doing this.