Gaming15 mins ago
Scanning problem
2 Answers
When I scan a document and then try to summon it up I get a coded version of it. How do I convert it to readable text?
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.How are you scanning and opening the document? Most scanners default to scanning things as an image (BMP or JPEG file).
If you've already tried the following, my apologies: what you need is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. Depending on what version of Windows/Office etc you have, you may already have Microsoft Document Imaging (information here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1832750,0 0.asp ). Your scanner possibly came with an OCR program (often a cut down version of ABBYY Finereader) or you could try SimpleOCR which is free/donationware from here: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/SimpleOCR.html (never used it myself).
The above programs will then try to convert the images the scanner creates into text. They tend to work best with black text on a white background and a good, crisp scan. Better OCR software will even try to convert handwriting. In my experience (though I've never used one of the expensive commercial packages) it tends to be a bit hit-and-miss and even when it has done a good job you will still need to check and edit the work.
If you've already tried the following, my apologies: what you need is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. Depending on what version of Windows/Office etc you have, you may already have Microsoft Document Imaging (information here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1832750,0 0.asp ). Your scanner possibly came with an OCR program (often a cut down version of ABBYY Finereader) or you could try SimpleOCR which is free/donationware from here: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/SimpleOCR.html (never used it myself).
The above programs will then try to convert the images the scanner creates into text. They tend to work best with black text on a white background and a good, crisp scan. Better OCR software will even try to convert handwriting. In my experience (though I've never used one of the expensive commercial packages) it tends to be a bit hit-and-miss and even when it has done a good job you will still need to check and edit the work.