Scan a Document as a .Doc file

[wwwproperties]

Hi,

I have a bunch of loose paper documents I would like to scan as .doc files. I have a Canoscan 5600 scanner. Does anyone know of a good way of doing this? I have an image of 1 of the documents I'd like to scan as a document http://entirefilingbankruptcy.com/fedexemptions.html - I would like to have this table but as a document to paste into the page with the correct formating.

I've tried using office document imaging, which allows me to copy the text from my document as a scanned .tiff image, except for the fact I lose the layout of the text from the document.

Any ideas? Cheers & thanks!

[Webzarus]

Nope... Not gonna happen... When you take something from an image, there is not a single program I know of that will create MS formats...

OCR is meant for text only, but I've never found a single thing that will scan and convert an image of a document and save the original formatting... Believe me, I've tried.

Scan and save to PDF or scan directly to PDF preserves the format, but its still in image format, once you OCR it and save or export to word, all formatting is lost.

I have several thousand patents that a client wants scanned and converted to word... But not gonna happen, with current technology ( that I'm aware of ).

[TheGAME1264]

Not to mention that OCR is at best about 95% accurate....even when something is MICR-encoded, like say a check. That means you're going to spend a whole bunch of time fixing errors and tracking errors and running into characters like @$*!(#)@!*!#! throughout your document.

Scanning technology is just not there yet.

[Webzarus]

I use a high end Minolta scanner, scan directly to COMPACT PDF, document is perfect in every way, selectable text, graphics, ect ... But when you "export" to word ( a real option in adobe ) the only problems it has is symbols as the symbol tables in word are different than symbol tables anywhere else, it still trashes the format, unless you're using standard letter ( left align ) formatting which no one does.

So even high end equipment and high end software is useless for scanning and converting to word.

Someone told me ( I haven't had time to try ), but they said if I Export to word, and open it with open office, it will display the formatting correctly, then save it out of there as a word document.

Not sure in want to waste my time, cause I'm sure MS has done something to fix that too .

[wwwproperties]

Unfortunately that's what I figured. OK thanks anyways for the replies guys!