PDF to Word?? = No

["Virginia J. Link" <LINKVI -at- MAIL -dot- STATE -dot- WI -dot- US>]

<snip>
Laura Praderio wrote:
David,
It is possible to scan documents into PDF, but to convert to an editable
Word
file---No. What happens is you scan the document into PDF format (using your
scanner and an Adobe driver for the scanner), which gives you an image-only
PDF document, not a text file. You can correct the image-only file, but
cannot
really edit it. For example, if you have three words in the middle of a
sentence and want to remove two then you have a gap in the image. I have
found
in working with Acrobat that the Capture Pages feature (the "editing
function") really doesn't work as you might expect because it is an image
you
are dealing with-not an editable file.

after David Orr wrote:
One of my clients heard indirectly that it's possible to scan document into
PDF format then later convert it to an editable Word file. This sounds
dubious to me. True? Not true? How does it work if true?

<end snip>

Hi all,

I've just this afternoon come from an Adobe demonstration of Acrobat and
Adobe's Capture 2.0 plug-in, and yes, you can scan documents into PDF
format, edit the pdf file, then save it to HTML, text or Word/Wordperfect
format.   Unlike other scanning software, Capture actually
translates/preserves the scanned text quite well.  If there's something it
can't be sure it's translating correctly, it saves the image as a bitmap,
which can be read as it actually appeared in the original document, and/or
which you can edit to correct if necessary.  The Capture plug-in is part of
Acrobat 3.0 (catalog price: $199), and is fine if you're going to scan in a
few documents at a time; if you're scanning _many_ docs, however, Adobe
recommends buying the actual standalone Capture package ($895?, which allows
the user to scan up to 20,000-pages) because it can batch-process multiple
docs into PDF once the image is scanned.  Check out the following website:

www.adobe.com/prodindex/capture

I have no connection with Adobe.

Virginia Link
linkvi -at- mail -dot- state -dot- wi -dot- us