Scanned OCR text to Word(for FAX) comes out unreadable.

[Tumbleweeds]

When I scan a document to send to Word for Fax, the OCR is performed just
before the scanned document is sent to Word. The text and signatures are
converted to unreadable characters mixed with partly readable text. This
makes for a thoroughly confusing and unuseable fax...Can anybody help me with
this crazy problem??...I can't find anything usefull so far...

 

[Graham Mayor]

Answered in one of the other Word groups to which you posted this - please
do not multi-post.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Peter Jamieson]

First, please note that this group is about MailMerge and Fields, not
scanning and OCR.

But what are you actually trying to do? Are you trying to OCR an incoming
fax so you can edit the text, or are you just trying to scan a document and
fax it? If you are trying to send a fax, you don't need to do OCR and you
should not really have to go near Word - you should be able to do the whole
job using the software that came with your scanner and/or the fax software
in Windows (depending on the version) and/or any fax package you have such
as Winfax.

If you are trying to edit the text, the thing is that the results of OCR are
heavily dependent on the quality of the original and the scanning process.
If the original just contains good quality text produced on a Word processor
and was printed well by the fax machine, the results of OCR would typically
be good, though not necessarily perfect. If the orginal has been annotated
by hand so that the text is obscured, or the quality of the print is poor,
expect the OCR results to be worse. You shouldn't expect handwriting to OCR
at all. There's no real alternative but to fix those problems by hand.
Typically, OCR facilities flag text that they can't recognise and offer some
fairly easy way to go through the problem areas, so it may be easier to do
that before you transfer teh document to Word.

Peter Jamieson