I have had this situation myself for years and have solved it in
various ways.
When all else has failed, I've used my digital camera to
photograph a document and save it as either a TIFF or BMP file, both of
which my OCR software can read from a file. At least, I've had a copy
of what it's supposed to look like, if I have to reconstruct it.I've also found
that by increasing the size and/or increasing the contrast on a scanned file
renders a better result. This involvs another step involving your photo
editing software.
Have you tried looking in your folder for your OCR software and looking for an
.INI or .INF file? Sometimes, the direction to open MS Word is located there
and can be edited to direct the opening of OpenOffice for scanned files. There
may also be some hidden places in your OCR folder that refer to MS Word. Using
Windows Search, making sure to check for hidden files, look for "word."
Depending on what versions of everything you are using, you may also want to
check for "winwrite" without the quotes.Another suggestion is for you to go to
My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > File Types and make sure that .DOC files
are to be opened (associated) with Oo Swriter. The Advanced tab will provide
you with more options.
HTH
Suzanne L. Perry
--- On Fri, 4/24/09, Harold Fuchs <hwfa.openoff...@googlemail.com> wrote:
From: Harold Fuchs <hwfa.openoff...@googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [users] Hand-held copier of printed text
To: users@openoffice.org
Date: Friday, April 24, 2009, 3:45 PM
On 23/04/2009 15:43, John Jason Jordan
wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:01:44 -0400
> James Knott <james.kn...@rogers.com> dijo:
>
>
>>> In addition to the above there's a third issue. By far the majority of
>>> scanners and OCR "engines" on the market produce documents that are designed
>>> for MS Office. Many will even invoke MS Word or Outlook automatically once
>>> the OCR process is complete. Of course that's a problem if you don't have
>>> either of those installed - which I don't. My scanner wanted to produce a
>>> ".doc" file and then automatically invoke Word. I can't separate those two
>>> functions. In other words I can't make my scanner produce a ".doc" file and
>>> then *not* invoke Word. I certainly can't get it to invoke Writer. The
best
>>> I can do with my scanner (HP 3770) is to make it scan to an RTF file and
>>> then not invoke anything automatically. This is OK but RTF is a lot
>>> feature-poorer than ".doc" so my results look a lot less like the original
>>> than they could and therefore I have a lot more work to do.
>>>
>
>
>> I assume you're running Windows. Perhaps you could create a batch file
>> called "word", which in turn launches Writer.
>>
>
> That is a good suggestion.
>
Ermm. Sorry but it isn't. The OCR software, as one would expect, looks in the
Registry to find a registered copy of Word which it then invokes with the
appropriate "command line options" (or API syntax?) so that Word opens with
the recognised text in the right places. To
make the suggestion work one would have at least to fake the Word-related
Registry entries that get made when MS Office is installed. One would then have
to have software that would recognise the OCR software's invocation and
translate it into Writer's language. I'm afraid that's beyond my technical
capabilities.
-- Harold Fuchs
London, England
Please reply *only* to users@openoffice.org
