[Hidden-tech] Problem with OCR from Adobe PDF

[Rich]

I have been scanning a number of my older papers (in all sorts of 
formats, from simple typed, to book chapters and newspaper articles)
and have generally found that scanning to word documents is very often a 
bust.

The ocr engine tries to deal with what it sees as sections using all 
sorts of word sections and
format changes - when it is just confused by visual imperfections in the 
document.

What I ended up doing is scanning to text and then importing into word, 
you then start with much cleaner text.
You just use the File/Open menu to open a text document in Word and use 
'save as' with the format
as 'Word' document.

Rich

On 3/2/2010 7:31 AM, George Forman wrote:
>
> Good Morning Hidden Techies,
>
> My question deals with my attempts to scan a text document and then 
> convert the scan to editable text.  I have created a .doc file but the 
> text is stuck in blocks that make it impossible to move text from one 
> block to another or to have the text build as one continuous flow.  I 
> wonder if there is some command I can use to "flatten" the text 
> document in Microsoft word, something that eliminates these funny 
> constraints.  Here is what I have done.
>
> 1. Scan the page using my HP All in One printer, creating a PDF file 
> directly from the scan.
> 2. Open the PDF in Acrobat Professional
> 3. Use OCR feature in Acrobat to convert print to editable text
> 4. Export as a .doc file.
>
> I work on a Mac using Snow Leopard as the operating system.
>
> Any ideas?  My gratitude in advance,  George
>
>
> George Forman, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor, UMass, Amherst
> President, Videatives, Inc.
> 19 The Hollow
> Amherst, Massachusetts
> 01002
> Phone: 413 256 8846
> Fax: 413 230 3130
> www.videatives.com <http://www.videatives.com>
> /See What Children Know™/
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Rich Roth
CEO On-the-net

Bringing you complex online systems since the net was young
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