Revising a Scanned Document

You can buy (best) or download free OCR software to do this. See here.

Any how he has to buy a Scanner & now almost all [even cheaper Scanners worth £ 15 or so in Pakistan come with OCR scanning].

The days have gone when only professional Scanners [HP was one of the manufactures] worth >> 2000 .

It is now normal but may be overlooked even by IT Professionals.

OCR = Optical Character Recognition, which is necessary to translate an image file into editable words. Sometimes it is desirable to inhibit this, such as in legal documents that need to avoid alteration. [I'm not sure, but I think that is why .pdf (portable document file) is often used in that and like contexts.] [Similar for raster vs. vector files for drawings.]

Scanned documents are graphics files and not Word documents. As others have suggested, you might be able to get away with OCR software, which will read the file and create a file of text... Hopefully.

If you have acrobat distiller, convert the graphic file to crobat. The distiller has the OCR inbuilt in it.

There are "document imaging" scanners that have this capability built in. They can scan and OCR (optical character recognize) pages in one pass, and create a Word (.doc) file or searchable PDF directly from the scanned pages. I have used the ScanSnap scanners made by Fujitsu, and I think HP and Canon have similar machines, but I am not as familiar with them. If you are doing this process often, it is worthwhile to look for a document scanner with built-in sheet feeder and good document-management software. It is a whole different experience compared to scanning a sheet on a flatbed and then trying to apply OCR -- a tedious undertaking.

I agree with You. this is the simpelist way togo. Had a scanner about 5 years ago that was capable of doing this, It wasn't to exspensive either.

oilcan13

You don't say what sort of revisions you want to make. You can extract the text in Acrobat by using 'File', 'Save as text' but this is very crude & loses all formatting & pictures.

If you just want to add comments or highlights etc. the free programme pdfXchange viewer will do that.

If you want to change the body of the text then the earlier comments about OCR are the way to go.

A short answer is that a scanned document is a picture of the document and not the document itself.

I just tried this free on-line PDF to Word converter on a fairly wordy science paper & it works great. The Word doc is e-mailed back to you in a few minutes with all the text available & images as objects with all formatting retained.

I am assuming that you need to do "word Processing" When you scan a document you get a "picture" of the dcument. No word processer like wordperfect, microsoft word handle "pictures. They only handle words. You need to scan your documents in "charecter recognition" mode. If you have pictures in your document read the directions in your software to handle picture. Documents scaned in "charecter recognition" mode can be handled by most word processeing programs. good luck

As always, very good - concise information. Once you guy's got me on the OCR path I find my new printer scanner had OCR but it had not synced with my computer.

I appreciate the help!

As always, very good - concise information. Once you guy's got me on the OCR path I find my new printer scanner had OCR but it had not synced with my computer.

I appreciate the help!

or you can try the online ocr tools, there are many free ocr converter in the google search.