Nowadays it is so easy to find amazing Thanksgiving recipes on the Internet for virtually any occasion, taste or diet. There are so many amazing blogs and sites with not only detailed recipes, but also step-by-step instructions for preparation. Thanks to this, you don’t need to be a world-class cook to make an amazing meal or even a Thanksgiving dinner.
But despite the Internet and tons of Thanksgiving recipes circling around the Web, many of us have that one priceless old family cookbook with everyone’s favorite recipe for the most savory, perfect Thanksgiving dinner (and all other important holidays). It has become a family treasure long ago and you open it only for those special occasions, because you fear that it will get damaged or that too much touching and page turning will ruin it.
Do you collect Thanksgiving recipes from magazines?
Another very common scenario would be that you collected recipes from magazines, recipe cards or scribbled them on any piece of paper or note-card you could find whenever you came across a yummy recipe. Now you have so many recipes that it is impossible to organize them, or, even worse, to find the one you want. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to digitize them, organize, tag and search them by ingredients or some other criteria? Not to mention the ability to add notes or even edit them?
How to Digitalize a Recipe without a Scanner?
If you have a scanner, it is no problem to scan them and turn them into images, which you can then easily convert to editable document formats, like Microsoft Word, using a file converter like PDF Converter Elite. It uses cutting-edge OCR technology, which enables you to easily pull out text from images into a Microsoft Word. But not everyone has a scanner in the first place, right? However, chances are you have a smartphone which lets you easily take pictures and transfer them to your computer. That, a Windows-powered computer and PDF Converter Elite are all you need to convert your Thanksgiving recipes to usable electronic file formats.
Here is how:
1) Prepare your recipe card, cookbook, notebook, or magazine with the recipe you want to digitize. As an example, we decided to digitize a recipe card for a “Spicy Turkey Roast” by Great American Recipes. Open the recipe page, take your smartphone and point it at the recipe while making sure to squeeze the whole text into the photo. Take your shot, or two, or as many as you need to capture the whole text. As you can see on the picture below, it doesn’t really need to be a perfect shot (you’re not trying to win a photo contest, just extract the text out of the image!).
2) Once you’ve taken your photo, just transfer it to your computer which has PDF Converter Elite installed on it.
3) Start PDF Converter Elite and open your image in it:
4) On the menu bar, select the Convert on the dropdown menu and then the Image to Word conversion option.
5) You will see the dynamic sidebar within the program on the right side of your computer screen, which allows you to select your Output type. Choose between .rtf, .doc, and .docx and then click the green Convert to Word button.
6) Once you’ve done that, you will get to choose where you want to save the conversion output on your computer. Do that and wait a few seconds while your image is being converted to Word.
That’s all! You have just digitized your recipe. Open your Word document and format or edit it any way you want: add or remove text, change styles, font, color, headings, layout, insert images, or anything else that you can normally do with text in Microsoft Word.
If you want to digitize many more recipes, just go through the same process for each of them and create your own digital cookbook. It is a fun thing to do. If you have children and grandchildren, they will probably be more than happy to help you take pics of your recipes.
The best part is that even though PDF Converter Elite isn’t free software, it comes with a 15-day free trial, which is more than enough for you to convert your favorite Thanksgiving recipes to electronic ones. So, go ahead and download PDF software now!
And if you like the tool and want to keep using it in the future, all you need to do is pay for a one-time, full license.