OCR software can save you a lot of typing when you only have a physical copy of a document. OCR stands for optical character recognition and such software can take an image such a scan of a document and provide an editable version of the text. Unless you are a particularly fast typist or only have a few pages that you need digitized, OCR software can be a lifesaver.
Popular commercial OCR software is Adobe Acrobat Pro and ABBYY FineReader. a9t9 is a free, open-source OCR software available as a Windows Modern app (for Windows 8 or Windows 10) licensed with GPL or through the Autonomous Technology website. The a9t9 app can be downloaded from the Windows Store. The a9t9 scanner website is available at http://onlineocr.a9t9.com.
a9t9 has good character recognition, supports 21 languages, and provides a GUI to the Microsoft OCR library. It supports PDF and image files with text to convert to text. You can learn more at the a9t9 website.