how can a person scan a letter on to a desktop and change some of the
text in the letter - using the same font that's in the letter

Hello ballybock-ga,

Scanners often come with OCR software (Optical Character Recognition
software). If your scanner did not come with OCR software, you will
need to purchase it separately. OCR software analyses the page and
reads the characters (letter by letter, word by word) and once this
process is complete, you can edit the text on your computer. If the
text is clear and easy to read, recognition will be close to 100%, but
if it is fuzzy or if there are other quality problems, the OCR
software would have difficulty getting a high success rate.

Some OCR software that I can recommend to you is: 

OmniPage 15: http://www.nuance.com/store/op15prof.asp
ABBYY FineReader: http://www.abbyy.com/finereader_ocr/
Office 2003 has OCR software built in. 

SimpleOCR: http://www.charactell.com/scanstore/InstSocr.exe (free, but
arguably not as high quality)

Please let me know if you require any clarification and I will do my
best to assist you further. All the best,

tisme-ga


Search Strategy:

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define:ocr

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Request for Answer Clarification by ballybock-ga on 23 Aug 2006 17:43 PDT

I appreciate your answer. I do have OCR on my scanner (Epson 2580) -
but when I used it on a pre printed form that had typwitten answers to
the questions on the form - when I downloaded onto the OCR program -
it was not an identical form of the original - half the text was
jumbled or missing - the text was in different styles than the
original etc. I thought it would be similar to a word document - an
exact duplicate that you can initiate any changes necessary. MY
problem could be the quality of the software I'm using. Any comments?
I'm satisified with the answer you've given me on your first reply.

Regards

Ballybock

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Clarification of Answer by tisme-ga on 23 Aug 2006 17:49 PDT

Hello ballybock-ga,

If you give me the name of your current OCR software, I can look at
the features and version number and tell you if it is the quality. It
is hard for me to decide if it is the original text (which could be
bad quality) or if it is the OCR software without seeing the original
document.

The best quality OCR in my opinion is OmniPage 15, but it is also
expensive. It would be your best shot in my opinion. Also a big
feature of the ABBYY Fine Reader mentioned in the original answer is
that it retains layouts as well and converts quickly to PDF (useful if
any graphics are in the document).

tisme-ga

The technology you are looking for is called Optical Character
Recognition.  Some scanners come with software that will do this, such
as most newer HP scanners and all-in-ones.  Check your documentation
for "editable text" or "OCR".  If you can't find it in your scanner
software, try this program:
http://www.simpleocr.com/

I have not used that program yet, though, so I do not know how well it
works, but as far as I can tell, OCR still has a far way to go before
it's proficient at its task.  Generally, I just re-type everything if
it's not too many pages.  Make sure you proofreed the entire thing.

I think what ballybock is after is a little more sophisticated than OCR.
OCR isn't going to give him the same font as in the original letter.
It sounds like ballybock wants to commit some sort of forgery.

I would recommend scanning the letter in bitmap format. Copy and paste
each letter of the alphabet you are after from existing words on the
page.

hello ballybock:

    Maybe you can try some better OCR program that can detect the font
more precisely. I once tried Microsoft Office 2003, it has a good OCR
component.

    Anyway, if the OCR program can not detect the font properly, when
you get the result document from the OCR, you can change the font in
your document editor, maybe Microsoft Office again. It's quite easy to
change the font of the letter, then you can change some words in it.