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General discussion

Correcting Format of Scanned Documents

Jul 23, 2010 1:03AM PDT

I have a terribly outdated scanner (Visioneer OneTouch 5800) with impossibly old software (PaperPort 7.5). It works just fine, up to a point. I scanned text from a page approx. 7-3/4" x 9-1/2". The dimensions of the text itself on this page are approx. 4-1/2" x 7-1/2". I scanned using "OCR quality" setting and sent the file to Notepad, which PaperPort does for me. The letter recognition errors are very minimal and I am quite pleased. The problem is that the text will not adjust to fit the page; it will not conform to the margins I set through Page Setup in either Notepad or Word. I have discovered that I can manually remove extra spaces and tabs (which I did not know were there) but this method is obviously such tedious torture as to defeat the purpose. Did I scan it in wrong? Is there an easy way to correct in PaperPort, Paint, Notepad or Word? And BTW I do not understand why PaperPort gives me the option of sending directly to Paint, Notepad or Wordpad but not Word; nor why Microsoft Office Document Scanning will not recognize my scanner. I am running Windows XP and Office 2003. My ultimate objective is to scan from a variety of book sizes to an ordinary Word document with proper pagination and text-wrapping. What can I do (besides spend money I don't have)?

Discussion is locked

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Not an offer to help,
Jul 23, 2010 6:17AM PDT

because this is likely to be too technical for me, but I found another discussion about this scanner and Windows XP here;
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7590_102-0.html?messageID=147499#147499

Have a read of that and see if it helps.

I also found a web site which offers drivers and manuals for the Visioneer OneTouch 5800 here;
http://support.visioneer.com/products/5800/downloads.asp

This may be a driver issue. For example, has this ever worked on your XP computer? Was it used before on an earlier version of Windows, like Windows 98?

If you do intend to try the driver offered, note the precaution in that web site to uninstall your current driver to install an updated driver.

I hope that helps.

Mark

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Did you try Wordpad format?
Aug 7, 2010 12:30AM PDT

It can be read by Word also. It might be better than Notepad format.

Kees

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A couple of longshot suggestions....
Aug 10, 2010 3:58PM PDT

1. try stripmail (http://www.dsoft.com.tr/stripmail/). Despite the homepage, it is useful for stripping out lots of different formatting, not just email. I use it most often for copying/pasting large amounts of text from PDFs, and even though Word is configured to paste plain text only, lots of formatting slips through. It has a one-click option that copies, strips formatting, then places the new stuff back onto your clipboard, for pasting into Word (or any other program). Well worth its price for me (its free of course).
2. Do you have to send to notepad? is there a way to run the OCR and then simply send it to clipboard? Its possible that pasting text into Notepad (either you or the program) might be goofing up an eventual conversion of that file in Word.
3. Barring anything else, what happens when you run another OCR? Try FreeOCR. You can save your scanned file as a TIF or PDF. Open up FreeOCR and it will quickly read/ocr the files, and then send to Word or clipboard. I've had good luck with that program as well.
4. If you think the OCR funtion might be goofing this up, you can also try using MS Office 2003 (digital imaging) or OneNote 2007 or 2010, all of which have thier own OCR. Just as with FreeOCR, import a TIF and let those programs recognize the text.