Document Scanning

[Carl Parrish]

Dennis Kibbe wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-12-29 at 10:03 -0700, Carl Parrish wrote:
>   
>> Anyone know of software that would allow me to scan a document into as
>> OpenOffice or text format? I can save as PDF fine but don't know of a
>> way to scan a document I can work with. 
>>     
>
> Carl,
>
> OCR works best on simple documents with clean type like a letter.  More
> complicated layouts with fancy type faces, sidebars, etc. will cause
> problems.
>
> If you don't need to edit the text just scanning as a 150dpi PNG or JPG
> will give you screen readable text.  
>
> Dennisk
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>   

Thanks JT and Dennis. I didn't know what I was looking for was called
OCR. With your info I found out that I don't have gocr on my fedora core
6 box. (and I don't know where to find a rpm). But I was able to find
OCR Shop (http://www.vividata.com/be_xtrlite_overview.html). It's *very*
pricey (~$1,000) but the demo worked great I was able to convert an 11
page image to text in less than a min. Very few corrections were needed.
I'm going to get gocr installed but if it doesn't work at least close to
as well as this I might just pony up the cash.