Edit scans

How can i edit a scanned document?

what software have you got and what kind of doc are you wishing to edit?

Thx for responding . I don't think i have anything but the original mac software and word that i bought from apple. I'm not sure what you mean by what type of doc. It was created on a dell

I think what he is asking is whether it is a graphic or text file. Note that unless you are using character recognition software even a text document will essentially be treated as though it is a graphic.

One thing to know about scanners is that they're dumb - they have no idea what they're scanning so, unless you're using special software, they generally treat everything like it's a picture. Thus, if it's a text document, you can't edit it unless it was scanned with OCR (optical character recognition) software. If you're just looking to edit a scanned picture, you can easily do so as you would any other picture.

What kind of document/scan are you trying to edit?

EDIT: Sly beat me to the punch! I'm too slow.

Yes it's a text. How can i get this ocr software? Thx

Check the software that came with the scanner. Some models will have basic OCR software included. This should give you an idea of some of the available options OCR Scanning Software for Mac: 4 Apps Compared | Mac.AppStorm

I downloaded velocraptor. Can someone please tell me how to use it to edit a document. Thx

The screencast section of their website has a demonstration video that should answer your question (here). In essence, you can't edit the document but you can copy the text and search it like you would a regular document.

Thx. Is there any software available that would enable editing?

TextEdit is included on your Mac and opens all kinds of text documents, even Word files. I'm kind of surprised that it didn't "just open" when you double-clicked on your text document.

To chas man loved your essay macs are the greatest. I'm talking about editing a scanned document. The software i downloaded worked fpr 1 doc nd not others. I'm sure it's me but i ........ Oh one more thing does anyone know how to get rid of or at least lessen the colored disk. I tried apple support but still no good. Thx

Hm.. most things are already said here, but it sometimes helps if people say it in a different way:

1)
You put something onto your scanner - the scanner takes something like a high resolution image of it and stores it in a certain file format on your computer. This is often pdf, jpg, png, ... It didn't matter what you scanned - those are just images to your computer. This means, if it's text, you cannot edit that text. If it's an image you could open it with Photoshop or something like that, and work on it.
2) As previously mentioned: Some scanners come with OCR software, still take a picture of the text you are trying to scan and tries to "read" the text and converts the image into a word document. That war you can edit the text. I have tried that before - doesn't really work super well in my opinion.

Hope that helps to clear things up a bit for you...

Cheers!

Thank you!