Software to Edit a Scanned Document
By Tim Brennan

About a year ago I moved house and in the process realised just how much stuff I had accumulated. This prompted me to go out and buy a scanner so that I could store several lever arch folders worth of university notes digitally as pdf files.

Some of my notes were hand written, some were drawings and I also had plenty of word processed hand outs that could make use of optical character recognition. I set about researching the market for the necessary software and hardware.

Because of the shear quantity of documents to store, I needed an automatic document feeder (ADF) on the scanner. This removes the chore of laboriously placing single documents into the scanner. Instead you can stick 20 sheets of paper in the feeder, click the mouse and a few minutes later it’s all done for you. Just make sure there are no staples or paper clips.

Scanners with ADFs were a bit out of my price range, but luckily I picked up a Brother MFC-3420c at half price from PC World, costing me only £60. This scanner is not that good at photos or pictures because the image quality is quite average. For scanning text though, that doesn't really matter so much. There are Cannon machines that look like the bees knees, but cost nearer £250.

On the software side, I read up on loads of reviews and the best I found seemed to be the Paper Port software. There are loads of useful features ranging from straightening wonky scans to amalgamating many documents into one big one. Also there are loads of file formats that you can save your scan as.

The optical text recognition is really handy if you want to get some blurb into word and then edit it or change the formatting. The accuracy is pretty good once you get the experiment with a few different resolutions to find the optimal dpi setting.

Having six years worth of notes stored on my hard drive not only has saved a fair amount of space, but it makes things easier to find. Using the "search" or "find" features of your Windows or Mac operating system is a big plus. If you give appropriate names to the scanned files, you can find what you looking for in a fraction of the time. If you have converted to an OCR document you can also scan the content of your documents as well.