Scanning text to create a Word document

[SteveD]

Isn't it possible to scan a page of printed text and create, by character recognition, a Word document?

What is this technique called and how do I do it?

[alleyandapu]

i have done this before i think it was ms office document imaging, you can find it in ms office tools. it depends on the quality of the original page. its sometimes not perfect you will need to edit the word doc afterwords but it should get the bulk of it scanned.

[vehelpfulguy]

The technique is called OCR (Optical character recognition)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character _recognition

Some scanners (or combined printer,copier,scanners) come with some OCR software.

[SteveD]

Thanks very much. OCR, that's what I couldn't remember!

neildownx, I downloaded the free trial of Abbyy Fine Reader and scanned my 36-page document which had been scanned and saved as a pdf file. Result - excellent, and the program's so easy to use. This document is now a Word file and it just needs spell-checking.

JFYI, it started as a hard copy of our diary which we kept when we went to Sri Lanka to adopt our daughter in 1984. My wife tells me she originally wrote it on a Wang!

Thanks for the suggestion.