document scanning

[alintatoc]

I would like to know if there is any way that I can scan some documents and then edit the text from the documents.

Thanks in advance!

[lordsmurf]

Yeah, absolutely. I have a Microtek scanner with an auto feeder, and I use the expensive version of Abbyy Pro. The $50 version is decent too, just not quite as good. Most scanners work, especially if they have a generic TWAIN driver (99% do).

This is called "OCR" scanning.

I can save as Word DOC, PDF, or TXT.

I've been OCR'ing text since ~1993. Amazing how well software works now compared to 15+ years ago.

[alintatoc]

Yeah, absolutely. I have a Microtek scanner with an auto feeder, and I use the expensive version of Abbyy Pro. The $50 version is decent too, just not quite as good. Most scanners work, especially if they have a generic TWAIN driver (99% do).

This is called "OCR" scanning.

I can save as Word DOC, PDF, or TXT.

I've been OCR'ing text since ~1993. Amazing how well software works now compared to 15+ years ago.

So I guess it depends on the scanner true?
I have Epson scanner.

[lordsmurf]

The software does the OCR, not the scanner. I use an Epson at work, among others.

[Squash]

I also use the ABBYY's OCR software and it's great.

If you have the software install disk for your scanner, you may already have a "lite" version of ABBYY called Finereader Sprint. That's what came with my Epson Perfection.

If not, and your needs are simple, you may be able to get by with a free option like FreeOCR, which is a Windows GUI for Google's Tesseract OCR engine:
http://www.softi.co.uk/freeocr.htm

If you have Microsoft Office, it has built-in OCR. It's in the 2003 and 2007 versions; don't know about others. But you have to install the Office Document Imaging component which I don't think is installed by default (maybe it is in 2003, I don't remember). The OCR component is a slimmed-down version of Omnipage Pro. It will scan if you want it to, or you can import an already-scanned file (only supports TIF files, as I recall, but it's easy to convert whatever image format you have to TIF using Irfanview or somesuch). I used it at work a few times and it's OK for simple stuff.

http://www.geckoandfly.com/2008/07/17/where-is-the-ocr-in-microsoft-office-2007/

Neither is as good as ABBYY, but they're free (well, one is, anyway).