How to Convert Scanned Document to Editable Text
There are some instances in your work that you need to change or edit “already a hard copy”, scanned to pdf or tif files, or simply a file with no more existing editable softcopy.
Scanned documents are in image form and not anymore editable using word processing software like Microsoft Word.
The solution is, actually, not anymore new and this could be just but for knowledge achieving purposes only.
The process of extracting text from an image is called Optical character recognition (OCR). Lots of software with this capability like ABBYY FineReader OCR, Adobe Acrobat, GOCR, and OmniPage are already available in the internet, some are free, and most are for a fee.
If you have Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 installed in your computer, you can efficiently do the job by following this simple instruction;
1. On the Windows Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Office, point to Microsoft Office Tools, and then click Microsoft Office Document Imaging.
2. In Document Imaging, click Open on the File menu.
3. Locate the file you want to open, and then click Open.
4. You can run OCR on the active document by clicking Recognize Text Using OCR 
If your scanned document is in jpeg, bmp or other file format, convert it first to .tif using MS paint.
After conversion, select all and copy the text to a separate word document for editing. Please take note that some of the image text might not be properly recognized by the OCR tool and not be correctly converted to text, thus, double-checking is necessary.
Filed in: Softwares and Applications
Local date: March, 2010
