[Solved] Scan forms and complete them on Mac

Issues installing under the Mac OSX - X11 - Aqua
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Jay Mac
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[Solved] Scan forms and complete them on Mac

Post by Jay Mac »

Does anyone have a idea how to scan forms or letters to Open office platform so that they can be changed?
MO has this ability but maybe Apache doesn't.
I have used Open Office version 4.1.5 for a few years and this is the only function that I haven't been able to use.
Jay Mac
Last edited by MrProgrammer on Sun Aug 28, 2022 4:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Tagged ✓ [Solved] AOO doesn't have these features, but MacOS does -- MrProgrammer, forum moderator
One Office 4.1.5
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MrProgrammer
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Re: Scan forms

Post by MrProgrammer »

Hi, and welcome to the forum.
Jay Mac wrote: Fri Aug 19, 2022 10:30 pm Does anyone have a idea how to scan forms or letters [on my Mac] …
Scan images or documents using a scanner and your Mac
I found that within seconds using the obvious web search "scan on Mac" which you could have done yourself instead of waiting for a response. That would have been much faster than creating an account here today to ask a question.

Jay Mac wrote: Fri Aug 19, 2022 10:30 pm … so that they can be changed
Your Mac comes with an application for form markup: Preview User Guide
Fill out and sign a PDF form in Preview on Mac
I found the latter link with the obvious web search "complete form on mac". "Fill out form on Mac" works too. Those three links are from Apple. Finder → Help → MacOS Help has all of this information for you and is a valuable resource when you have a question about your Mac.

Jay Mac wrote: Fri Aug 19, 2022 10:30 pm I have used Open Office version 4.1.5 for a few years and this is the only function that I haven't been able to use.
OpenOffice was not designed to scan documents, nor was it designed to complete forms. Attempting to use it for those tasks would be a waste of your time. OpenOffice is the wrong tool on a Mac to open PDFs; use Preview.


If this solved your problem please go to your first post use the Edit button and add [Solved] to the start of the subject field. Select the green checkmark icon at the same time.
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Re: Scan forms and complete them on Mac

Post by Mountaineer »

Jay Mac wrote: Fri Aug 19, 2022 10:30 pm ... how to scan forms or letters to Open office platform so that they can be changed?
MO has this ability ...
Usually the keyword you need is OCR - optical character recognition.
IMHO M$-Office does not include this. But you can use Microsoft-Lens for this. I checked this out on a smartphone and it works nicely. You are not forced to use MS-Office to edit the files afterwards....

For your problem you have to look what you really want:
- A scan gives a photo of your document. This can be changed as any graphics by paintig over it, but you can't search the contents.
- Sometimes a scan is sufficient, if used as a backgroud image in Word/Writer, where you write over the image and print out the result. Good for government-forms, wich you print and have to sign...
- With OCR the Software tries to generate text and even tables again. Result has to be tested.... I used FineReader on Windows some time ago, but there are many others now. Test if the program fits your needs...
I never checked wich one can create a fillable form...

Attention: PDF-Files can contain all 3 variants: Scaned images, text with space left between or actual forms to fill (and even additional program-code to help/check filling the document). You can NOT detect/differentiate this by file-type - only by analyzing the contents with special tools.

J
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RoryOF
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Re: Scan forms and complete them on Mac

Post by RoryOF »

On Linux (Xubuntu) I use gImageReader as a front-end, which uses Tesseract as the OCR program. gImageReader might (not checked) be available for Windows and/or Mac.
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Re: Scan forms and complete them on Mac

Post by John_Ha »

The best workaround is probably

1. Insert the scanned image in the background
2. Add a frame where you need to type text.
3. Type in the frames.

It's clunky and lining up will be difficult.

You could just type over the image but you will need to set the line spacing so as to line up the text with the place it should be typed. Again, it's very clunky.

Attempting to convert the scanned text to proper text will work but will probably involve a great deal of correction and formatting making it not worth while.
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