How can I edit text on a scanned document??

I have been trying for hours. I bought a Canon MX410 and it has it so you can change it to text edit. BUT when I do it looks weird. It looks like some newspaper clipping. And there is no picture or anything even RESEMBLING the document. I

tried putting it right into neo office that didnt work.

I tried putting it in the text edit which is already on my mac and it said to to find the words I want to change and then replace. All that did was erase my whole document.


All I want to do is change a few words in the document. Nothing else.



Im at my wits end here.

When you scan a document in, the computer essentially takes a picture of it. It doesn't recognize it as 'words on a page', instead, it just sees it as dots on a grid.

What you need is software that can do OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This software will basically scan the picture, looking for patterns and converting them to words. OCR can be hit or miss, depending on the quality of the scan.

I am a little confused about your first sentence. You said that your Canon "has it so you can change it to text edit". I'm going to guess that the scanner has some kind of OCR capability built-in. And if that's the case, and you're getting poor quality output, perhaps the original document is confusing the printer's built in OCR capability. You may be better off trying to just do a basic scan and then using your computer for OCR instead.

Of course, you'll need a software package that can do this. One that comes highly recommended is PDF Pen.

Great! I will definately check this out.

if you find that you don't have OCR software already (my Canon scanner didn't come with OCR software), you might want to check out this product:

PDF OCR (free/$30)
PDF OCR X - Mac & Windows OCR Software to convert PDFs and Images to Text

This is the least expensive OCR product that I know of.