TexasCHLforum.com

I have been trying to transfer some typed documents to Microsoft Word. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a software package (Nitro PDF Professional) and it does a great job of transferring a PDF file to Word; however, it will not transfer a scanned document to Word. Now my question: Is there an inexpensive software that will transfer a scanned document to Word.

Thanks,

Jerry P.

When you scan a document, it basically turns into a graphic image. To read the letters off of it, you will need to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. I am not familiar with any of the newer packages out there, but you might check out http://www.simpleocr.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; which is supposed to be a freeware OCR. How accurately it reads the document and translates is will depend on your scanner, the font and how clear the document is.

Adobe also has OCR as part of their Acrobat program. You can run it through that and then export to Word. I don't know how will it works, but if you already have Acrobat, you may as well give it a try.

We use a large scanner to scan documents to pdf, but when we need to scan something to Word, we use a Fujitsu Scansnap scanner. (It scans to pdf or Word.) I don't know what they cost now.

Chas.

Very few people actually have Adobe Acrobat, as the least expensive version retails for $299.

What almost everyone has is Adobe Reader.

I have an old version of Paperport that does what you want, but the current version isn't cheap.

Looks like Google has a solution
Google Docs

Files suitable for OCR can come from a number of sources:

Image or PDF files obtained using flatbed scanners
Images captured using digital cameras or mobile phones
Uploaded images or PDF files are used to extract text parts, which are converted into a Google document.

http://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answ ... wer=176692" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

good summary of options here

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/0 ... ed-by.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;