VeeshanVault

Is it possible to scan something into a Word document and have it retain the formatting?

In case that isn't clear enough, here is exactly what I'm trying to do. My dad has a printed copy of his resume but and wants to get it back on his computer (HD crashed), I believe the resume must have been created using a template, cause there are things like headers and lines separating the sections of the resume. When you scan it to a file, it loses any of that formatting and just retains the text.

Scanning to a PDF won't work because he doesn't have a pay version of adobe and I don't want to go through the extreme hassle of setting up a pirated copy (they have gotten pretty good at blocking these), and obviously scanning it in as a picture will do no good because he wants to be able to edit it.

I don't think there is any way to make this work but my alternative is re writing it for him and I didn't want to have to do that if I don't have to. Thanks for any help.

I have never seen any OCR that's any good a retaining formatting.

There is OCR software that retains formatting out there, but it's spendy. I worked on a project several years ago in which we needed to scan documents with retained formatting. Those documents weren't terribly complex (probably more complicated than a resume, though), but the software did, for the most part, do what we needed it to do. I can't remember the name of the software package we ended up using, but it cost a few hundred bucks a seat at the time. If you want, I can send out a couple e-mails and maybe get an answer on the specific product.

I'm pretty sure that there's an import extension for OpenOffice that you can use to import formatted PDF documents. You may want to check into that and see if scanning to PDF and importing to OO.o works for you.