Can I edit a printed page that I have scanned onto a pc?

Question

My 82year old dad is coping very well with his new pc on the whole but has just lost a 19 page document on it that we CANNOT find! He has probably made mistakes saving it.
We do have an earlier printed unrevised copy so I am wondering if it is possible to scan it back onto the pc and then do the revisions/additions again onto the new document? Any advice as to how to go about this will be gratefully received.The pc has WindowsXP if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

Use an Image editor like for editing pictures. Text is a very simple image, to the computer at least.

To look for the document on disk, go offline, NEVER do this while online and especially with Microsoft products, open the root directory,
C:\ click View then click Show all Files, show hidden files and directories. Usually there is a directory called cache, written in several places on the disk. Usually it is also a hidden directory.
You know the name of the document, if you search for it with the show all files option set you will find it.
If he accidentally deleted it, Windows has a program called undelete, because windows doesn't actually delete or erase a file by default, it renames it : mytextdoc.doc becomes ?ytextdoc.doc.
the leading "?" means that windows has approved that area of the disk to be overwritten, the data is still there until that block of disk space has another file written over it.
If you run undelete it will list all the files that have been marked like that, find the one you need and restore it.

Answer 2

What you need is Optical Character Recognition software. This will take the scanned image and extract the text from it.

There are lots of commercial products out there. If you don't mind editing the page after the scan is done, you can use any of the freeware versions. Just search the internet for OCR and pick one of the free software packages.

Once you're finished, make sure you spellcheck...and SAVE!

Answer 3

Yes, you can with some scanners. Some scanners ask you what you want to scan to (ie File, Email, Copy etc.) look to see if you can scan to MS Word. This way you can edit the document. Some scanners use OCR, which when scanned it trys to reconized each word. This may be helpfull,but alot more work.

Answer 4

Sure you can. If you have a scanner then it will probably have ocr (optical character recognition) software supplied with it. Once scanned, you should be able to convert it to text and edit in word etc. As it happens, I'm scanning and editing music notation right now!

Answer 5

Maybe I haven't tried the best optical character recognition software but my experience has been that I can retype a page faster than scanning it, doing the OCR, and then correcting all the mistakes that it makes.

Answer 6

Hi, I have HP's "Readiris" that came free with a camera or the printer, but forgot which. I've only used it twice and it works ok and does what you need it for, scan it and edit. Hope that's useful.

Answer 7

Yes, if you scan it using O.C.R.
Optical Character Recognition, software.
It will save it as a text file, and not a picture.

Answer 8

Without that OCR software, there's the Photoshop technique. If you don't have Photoshop or that software, there is really no other way to revise the copy.

Answer 9

Yes you can. If you have Microsoft office installed on your PC. Go to the START MENU, go to ALL PROGRAMS, go to MICROSOFT OFFICE, then go to MICROSOFT OFFICE TOOLS, and then select MICROSOFT OFFICE DOCUMENT IMAGING. Use this program to scan your documents. It makes it easy for you to edit any document that you scan.