Hi, I have a printer/scanner all in one dx4000. When I scan a letter or
document into the scanner, when I go to read it it is all in some sort of
code, and of course I cannot copy/paste when needed.
A scanner is a device that essentially takes a picture of what it
scans. You may be scanning a piece of paper that you recognize as a
letter of document, but the scanner doesn't know that. So the result
is not text itself, but a picture of the text.
You are presumably trying to read that picture of text in your word
processing program. But the word processing program can only process
words, not pictures of words. The result is that you see what you are
calling "code." It's of course not any kind of code at all, but just
the result of looking at a picture with the wrong program.
There exists software which can take such a picture of text, look at
it, recognize letters and words within, and create an output document
with words instead of pictures in it, which can then be processed by
your word processing program. Such software is called Optical
Character Recognition (OCR, for short) software, and that is what you
need to do what you want.
There are several different OCR programs on the market; the one that I
use is called "OmniPage," but there are other good choices available.
Many scanners come with starter versions of such software, but if
yours doesn't, you will need to buy one.
Recognize that no OCR product is perfect. Depending on what font the
original is in, how clean it is, etc., they all make mistakes, so it's
necessary to proofread the results carefully to correct any errors in
"OCRing."
