2008/7/21 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I am trying to find a way to scan a document,send as a PDF file so I can > type into it and than print it. I know there is software that will do > this but it is very expensive,and way out of my price range,that is why I > am wondering if you have any thing like this that will > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sincerely,Jon Bennett >
You'll probably be able to do the scanning part with software that came on a CD with your scanner. Generically it's called OCR for Optical Character Recognition. This software scans the document and converts it to text. Most such packages are set up to convert to either MS Word or RTF (Rich Text Format). Popular software titles are ReadIris and TextBridge but there are others. If no such software came with your scanner you'll need to find some; Google is your friend. I'm not sure if there's much freeware out there. If you don't have MS Word installed its likely the OCR package won't work if you ask it to scan to MS Word format; mine certainly doesn't. So scan to RTF and have the software save the result directly to a file. Once you have the text in RTF format you can open it with OpenOffice Writer and export it to PDF. However, without expensive PDF (Adobe) software I don't think you'll be able to make an editable PDF file. The simple alternative would be to have OpenOffice just save the file in its native ODF (Open Document Format) file. The option is "Open Document Text" with an extension ".odt". In either case you'll be able to print the document. In fact you could simply leave the file in RTF format and print that. RTF doesn't allow for complex formatting but it's fine for many things. It and PDF have the advantage that they are readable on most people's computers whereas ODF requires the person either to have OpenOffice or a plugin for MS Office, which can't yet read ODF natively. Hope this helps. -- Harold Fuchs London, England Please reply *only* to users@openoffice.org
