Can you mark up a scanned rehearsal script?
Yes. A scanned script can be marked up and called from like any other. The difference is that a scan is a picture of the words, not the words themselves, so anything that needs the text takes an extra step.
How to tell if your script is a scan
Open the PDF and try to select a word. If you can highlight it and copy it, the PDF has text. If you get a box drawn across the page, or nothing at all, it is a scan. Searching for a word you can see is another quick test.
Getting a better scan
If you are making the scan yourself:
- Scan at 300 dpi, in greyscale or black and white rather than colour.
- Keep the pages flat and straight. A document feeder or a flatbed beats a phone photo, but a phone scanning app is fine in a hurry.
- Scan the whole script as one PDF, in page order, including the pages with the printed page numbers.
- Check your performance licence first: some say whether the script can be copied, and how.
Placing cues on a scan
A cue goes where you click, so a scan is no obstacle to marking it up. Cuemark shows a SCAN badge on pages with no text and turns off what needs text (selecting, highlighting and search), while the cue tool carries on as normal.
Reading the text on your own machine
To get search, highlighting and cue lines back, the words need reading off the page, which is OCR. Cuemark does it on your computer with nothing uploaded: Edit ▸ Read This Page with OCR for one page, or read the whole script in the background and keep working. It cleans each page up first (straightening it, lifting grey copier paper to white, evening out a phone photo's shadow), and the result is saved with the project so a script is only read once.
Check what the machine read
OCR makes mistakes, especially on faint or handwritten pages. Cuemark keeps a confidence for every page and tags any cue whose line came from OCR, in the cue list, the editor and on the printed cue sheet, so you know which ones to read against the page before the tech. Nobody should call a cue off a line no person has checked.
Licensed scripts stay on your machine
Because the OCR runs locally, a licensed rehearsal copy never goes to an online service to be read. The scan, the text and your marks stay on your own disk.