How do I change or edit text in a scanned document?

[Guest]

I scan a document with HP all in one I cannot get it to let me change text in
the scan program or in word. I know this must be possible but I don't know
know how.

 

[Margaret Aldis]

If you have just scanned the document using an ordinary scanner then all you
have is a picture of the text - not editable characters.

To get something you can edit you need OCR (Optical Character
Recognition)software to interpret the "marks on the page" as text
characters.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You may have entirely different software from mine (I have the HP ScanJet
4570c), but if you have the HP Director, you need to choose Scan Document
(not Scan Picture), select Editable Text, and send it to WordPad. This gives
you editable text you can copy/paste into Word. If you choose "Save to File"
as your Destination, the software creates a PDF, which I thought might work,
but I found that when I save from Acrobat to a "Word document," I get an
image file. There's probably some other secret to this, but for what I was
doing the best solution for me was to scan to WordPad and copy/paste to
Word. I found that the software did a surprisingly good job of OCR, though.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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