TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
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An anonymous techwhirler is looking for: <<...Suggestions on getting
hundreds of scanned docs (.pdf) into MS Word format. These docs were
hard copies scanned into .pdf format.>>
The first question to ask is whether you can get your hands on the
original files. The fact that they've been scaned suggests not, but
sometimes they still exist somewhere, and spending a few hours finding
the originals will be far more productive than any other approach. Of
course, an astonishing number of people completely lack a clue and
simply erase the original files when they're done printing them. D'oh!
So you may not be able to find the original files in a reasonable
amount of time, if at all.
The second question to ask is just how much revision you need to do. If
the originals are out of date and poorly written, it may make more
sense to simply use them as reference material and rewrite them
entirely from scratch.
<<Only options I can think of are re-typing everything or using
voice-recognition. Any suggestions? Any technologies?>>
"Optical character recognition" (OCR) is your best bet if neither of
the above suggestions helps, since you'll spend many hours training
voice recognition technology, the accuracy rate will probably not be
great even then, and you can probably retype the manuscripts about as
fast as you can read them into the computer and then proofread them.
OCR of really crisp scans easily exceeds 99% accuracy nowadays, but
that's not as good as it sounds; it still means one error roughly every
20 words. Budget time for proofreading to catch typos.
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