Scanning text

[Ken Veal]

I follow the list below to scan a page of text from a book or whatever in order to print it.
In X5 Import-twain aquire
The Scan Gear software associated to my Canon Lide 210 scanner allows me to preview the select the area to be scanned
After the scan the result then shows in the X5 workspace where I can make any edits etc
I then edit-copy and paste it into a Word 2013 document.It then shows as a fraction of the size and I have to pull the corner to get it to a readable and normal size
Is the above procedure the best way to do what I am after, why is the word doc image so initially small.

[hartpaul]

What you are posting into the Word document is an image. If you want the text you need to use an OCR program (Optical Character Recognition). There are some simple free ones and I think some online conversions as well. Do a google search for that.

[Ken Berry]

And if you have Windows Office, at least some of those have an excellent Scan/OCR program when you do a full install. I use the one which came in my Office 2007 quite a lot, and I recall it was also part of Office 2003, but it does not seem to be part of Office 2013 Home which I got with a Windows 8.1 tablet I bought a couple of weeks ago. I also use OmniPage which is the Rolls-Royce of OCR programs, but expensive...

[LeviFiction]

If you have a Google account, Google Drive also does OCR conversion of an image into a Google Doc. You lose all formatting, and it's not the greatest.

But it's what I use at work. I scan all of my documents using a copier and email the resulting PDF to myself. Open it in Google Drive, and do a conversion to Google Docs. From there it's minimal effort to get the text back the way it should be and takes up a heck of a lot less space than the image did.

[Ken Veal]

After reading your replies, I decided to look into my scanner button options, something I should have done before but have always relied on PSP to scan items without considering anything else. What I have found out is an eye opener for me ,although not using PSP to scan does not allow for cloning out unwanted bits etc, I am pleased with what I have discovered. I typed some letters scattered over a page, printed it then scanned it via the scanner copy button .It then printed out exactly as originally typed. I then scanned a page of a book via the copy button on the scanner and it printed out everything to scale.Next, I scanned the original printed doc via the copy button but this time selected the OCR option in the Canon MP Navigator box. I saved it in a temp notepad in Word, this was editable just like any other word doc.This box also has options for PDF amongst much more selections.

[tonytong]

What you are posting into the Word document is an image. If you want the text you need to use an online OCR program (Optical Character Recognition). There are some simple free ones and I think some online conversions as well. Do a google search for that.

I agree, if you want to extract text from your book, fist you need scan you book into your computer as images, then using the ocr to extract text from these images. most ocr software can save the text to txt and pdf document.

[marcoscott]

How do you scan a document on a Lexmark printer?

[Ken Veal]

As far as I know no printer will scan unless it has a built in scanner, some printers are "all in one". The user guide will tell you how to scan.

[marcoscott]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply

[Jean-Luc]

Is the above procedure the best way to do what I am after, why is the word doc image so initially small.

It is a matter of DPI/PPI.
If you change the Resolution value of your scanned image inside PSP without to change the pixels size (numbers), you will observe that the "same" image with different DPI values shows at different sizes when imported in Word. The higher the DPI value, the smaller it will show in Word.