I have alot of documents at home and work that I would like to scan and then edit in Microsoft Word or Excel. Basically I do not want to recreate the documents from scratch and have to figure out the formating and do alot of typing etc.
These documents are complex forms with many different margins, boxes, and graphics. Will the scanning document software help me? Would it be worth the $129 investment?
2007-03-13 03:20:25 · 3 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Software
To answer your first question...
I do! I do use OCR (optical character recognition) software from time to time.
The quality of the recognition varies largely depending on several factors:
- the quality and resolution of the scan
- the quality of the source material and the contrast between the color of the paper (white or... maybe yellow-wish?) and the color of the characters
- the font used
- the sharpness of the glyphs and the resolution they were printed at
Depending on these and possible other factors, you might have to spend a lot of time spell-checking and correcting the resulting documents.
If you plan to scan large documents and/or containing complex formatting, charts or tables it might be better not to use the OCR software at all. You could simply scan and convert to jpg files (or multipage TIFF or even PDF). The currently available storage solutions such as DVD's or large hard disk drives can store enough pages as scanned pictures or PDF files. The only problem in this is that you won't be able to search text in a scanned picture. If you dont (really) need this then I don't think the OCR worth it. And I am not talking about the money, but about the time needed to repair, format and correct the results. On the other hand, if searching text is a must, then you will have no other solution but to go the OCR way. (Or write from scratch :D)
Good luck!
2007-03-13 03:25:01 · answer #1 · answered by rebel_g 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Yes. I use Caere's Omnipage 12 which can be set for different languages even.
2007-03-13 03:26:20 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
do a yahoo search for ocr! some software comes with a scanner that has ocr
2007-03-13 03:24:25 · answer #3 · answered by Spyro The Dragon 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋