Windows software to convert photo to scanned document?

May 2, 2019 2:33 AM

There are mobile apps such as Office Lens and Scanbot which will take photos and automatically manipulate them (straighten, auto-contrast, combine pages etc) so the output is equivalent to a scanned document. There must be something like this for Windows. Anyone aware of anything?
posted by Kiwi to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Adobe Acrobat Pro tries to do this, and by "tries," I mean it'll turn a scanned PDF into a Word document that can look pretty decent, but may do some really weird things when you start editing it. I imagine there are similar PDF to [x] programs that produce similar results.

How long is the document, how precise do you need to be, do you want to manipulate the resulting document, and do you expect to do this again? Adobe allows you to try Acrobat Pro DC for 7 days. There are other programs that also offer to do this, some for free (Duck Duck Go search for pdf to word ocr windows 10).

If you're not worried about sharing the content of the PDF, Online OCR dot net claims to be able to take an uploaded PDF and turn it into a MS Word (DOCX), MS Excel (XLSX) or plain text file. So does ConvertPDFtoWord.net and PDFtoWord.pro and a dozen more sites, which I found by searching for "pdf to word ocr" in Duck Duck Go.

If you want to have more control over the end product, it might be easier if you just look for a product that does PDF OCR for Windows (another search, with some "best products" lists). The benefit of just applying optical character recognition (OCR) is that you can then copy the text and make a new document by hand, which should cut down on the weird formatting done in PDF to Word conversion systems.

To be clear, the issue is that such a process may result in strange paragraph structures, odd font choices, and other ways to make a scanned document into an editable document that appears to be a direct copy of the original file. The rougher the scan (say, a scan of a photocopy), the more weird errors can get introduced to reproduce that original document's appearance.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:57 PM on May 2, 2019

Office lens is available for Windows 10 for desktops in the windows store as well. Never tried it though.
posted by rpn at 1:48 AM on May 3, 2019