Editing scanned document

I have a MacMini OS X10.6 and a Canon MP490 printer. I have a paper document that I have tried to scan and edit without success. I am able to scan, but can't get beyond that point. What is the proper method to do this?

Hi and welcome to the forums

needadvice said:

I have a MacMini OS X10.6 and a Canon MP490 printer. I have a paper document that I have tried to scan and edit without success. I am able to scan, but can't get beyond that point. What is the proper method to do this?

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How was scanned to your Mac ?? If you scanned it in as a PDF then right click and open with Preview. Click the Annotations button and away you go. Edit to your hearts content

Here is a rundown on it and look down from point 10

Cheers

Click the Annotations button and away you go. Edit to your hearts content

Click to expand...

AFAIK you can't actually edit text, ie delete stuff and add more, in Preview. You'll need something like Adobe Acrobat Pro:
PDF editor, edit PDF | Adobe Acrobat X Pro

or PDF Pen which is a LOT cheaper.
http://smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/

You may have the option to scan as text. We had a scanner at work that would scan text into Pages. It wasn't perfect as you had to check for any errors.

Normally when you scan something (unless it's a pdf) it's saved as a jpeg or a tiff file. In order to edit it you need some OCR software to convert it to text.
There are several good ones such as ReadIris. Check here: Search for 'ocr' MacUpdate Software Updates and Downloads for Apple Mac OS X and iPhone

If you save the scan as PDF using preview, you can upload it to Google docs and it the do the character recognition for you free