How to Edit a Scanned Document

Let's look at how to edit a scanned document. As explained in the previous post, scanned documents are real life documents scanned into digital format. The common scanned document would probably be text scanned into an image format.

Say you had a typed up piece of paper and you wanted to get it on your computer in digital format and then edit the scanned document. You could use a scanner and scan it onto your computer. That would produce an image of the document, but how do you edit the scanned document image?

How to Edit a Scanned Document

The truth is that there is no way to extract, insert, or delete the text from the scanned document image without the use of special software with OCR capabilities. Meaning, you cannot simply select text from a scanned document because it is an image. You can edit the image in an image editor, but you cannot extract, insert, or delete text in the scanned document. So to go back to "OCR", OCR stands for "Optical Character Recognition". OCR can transform letters from a scanned image into a text document.

The solution on how to edit a scanned document is simple--use OCR software. I wish there was an easier way around editting a scanned document, but if you have a lot of scanned documents you have to edit, you will definitely get your money's worth from an OCR software solution.

One really great piece of OCR software is OmniPage 17. It's one of the latest up-to-date solutions out there today. You can check it out here. You can also see a review of it I wrote here.