Scanning documents

[qball263]

I need to scan a document to edit and save for future use. When I scan, it saves it to my Pictures file (Win7/32) or Pictures file as PDF and I am not able to pull it into OOo. How do I "properly" scan this document? I do hope I'm making myself clear. Thanks in advance...

[RoryOF]

This is what a scanner does. It effectively makes a picture of your document. If you wish to edit it, you must pass the scan through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application, which often includes a scanning front end, and an exporter that will export the recognised characters of the document, usually as text, rich text, or MS Word (.doc) format. Often such OCR applications (of perhaps limited functionality) are supplied with your scanner, on CD.

[TheGurkha]

Scanners make an image out of the document they scan, or they make a PDF.

Scanners can't magically recreate the electronic version of the document that produced the paper document you're scanning back in. To render this scanned image into an editable document, you need to either pass the scanned image through an Optical Character Reading program (which have varying degrees of success) or, if it is a PDF you need something that can edit the PDF.

There is a SUN PDF extension for OOo, but it is intended for very minor edits (eg. correcting typos): Sun PDF Extension.

If this has answered your question please go to your first post and use the Edit button, and add [Solved] to the start of the title. You should select the green tick icon at the same time.

[Hagar Delest]

Just to add a clarification: very often, as you say, the scanner puts the scan in a PDF file. But the PDF is just a container that holds the pic, that's all, it's not because the file is a PDF that it will be more editable than a standard pic.

[ammine007]

same problem!

Do you know any good OCR that can render ods files from my scanned PDF or Image contains only black/white caracters.

I'm under Linux, i'm not interested in .exe programs

Thank you !

[peterroots]

There are some command line OCR tools around which I have not tried for a long time as I currently do not have a scanner - ocropus + tesseract (often used together) and cuniform. These may be worth a try if you are happy with no GUI