Copy Typing – a Service as Old as Time
Copy typing is the production of a written document from another written document. The written document produced by the process of copy typing is usually a typed, digital version that can be manipulated and edited. The document that is copied by the process of copy typing is often handwritten or in a format that is unable to be edited.
One of the key reasons copy typing is a professional service provided and supplied to clients around the world by University Transcriptions is because there are considerable amounts of documents and files out there that require editing, but are not in an editable format.
Copy typing is particularly required when it comes to dealing with handwritten documents that need converting into digital files. Whilst there are software solutions for doing this, most of them are not very accurate or sufficiently powerful enough to identify all forms of handwriting and to produce digital documents to the standards of format required by our clients without a lot of extra work.
You can have a go online at converting any file to an editable document simply by searching for a conversion file and using adding the text ‘OCR.’ OCR (optical character recognition) is a software type that recognises characters and converts them into editable text. It can be very effective if you have a .pdf file that is clear and concise. It is not so effective if you have a handwritten document or a photograph of text that is slightly blurred.
Producing copy typing does mean that accurate data is provided in editable files, formatted and ready for you to use. A professional copy typist can convert documents at high speed using touch typing. A touch typist is someone who can look at one document and produce another document by typing on a keyboard without looking at the keyboard or the document they are preparing. This means that they can be extremely efficient when producing the new document from the item being copied and the new document will be also proofread afterwards to make sure it is completely correct.
One key area for copy typing is the use of .pdf files by so many organisations and individuals. Pdf files were invented by the company Adobe with the idea of being able to effectively take a photograph of a written document in any format and send it to someone else without them being able to edit it unless they have pdf editing software available.
Naturally Adobe provide this pdf editing software at a cost and deliberately make pdf files very difficult to edit or manipulate by anyone without their software in place. This means that pdf files tend to be one of the key areas for copy typing, because the pdfs are unable to be converted and someone else who wants to use pdf text has to be able to extract the text from the photograph as part of the pdf.
Whilst this can be done quite simply if the pdf document is simply a word document converted to pdf and hence is in very good condition, a lot of pdf files are more image-based files and the text is very difficult to do anything with.
This is why copy typing is a growing area of our business, and why we spend considerable amounts of time and effort training & recruiting specialist copy typists able to work on these types of files accurately and effectively for our clients.
If you have any questions about copy typing and the work of copy typists please get in touch.
