-------- Original Message -------- From: M Henri Day Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2016 17:09:00 +0100
> 2016-02-24 0:19 GMT+01:00 Robert Carney <rlcarney5...@gmail.com>: > >> I have a form that has blanks for me to fill in. I would like to scan the >> form, import it into Open Office and fill in the blanks. What do I need to >> do? Any help appreciated. >> >> -- >> Robert L. Carney >> rlcarney5...@gmail.com > > > Robert, doesn't your scanner/all-in-one-machine > > offer the option to scan the form to a .pdf file ? In that case, you > should be able to edit it in Draw.... > > Henri I doubt that this will work, because scanners can only create a bitmap image and a scanner's software "Scan to PDF" option will normally create a PDF file with bitmaps (pictures) of the scanned pages, which will not be editable in Draw with the PDF extension or any other PDF editor. Annoyingly, I routinely get this type of PDF file from clients and have to expend valuable time converting them back into an editable format. There needs to be a stage between the scanned image and the PDF file creation, such as OCR conversion. Some scanners are supplied with basic, but reasonably usable, OCR software. More sophisticated commercial software (eg. ABBYY FineReader, Nitro Pro, Acrobat Pro) do have the ability to scan and convert into an editable, but not 100% perfect, PDF or MS Word document. A couple suggestions for Robert: 1. Scan the form to a a jpeg or png file and run that file through one of the free OCR programs, previously recommended in this thread, take the resulting text and import or copy/paste it into Writer. Then reconstruct the form in Writer and export it to PDF, create a printed document, or whatever is most appropriate. 2. Take the scanned image and set it as the page background in a Writer document, use suitably positioned, transparent, borderless text frames or boxes to enter the required information over the top of the page background. Then export it to PDF, create a printed document, or whatever is most appropriate. Both options are very "fiddly", but they do avoid the need to purchase expensive commercial software that might be of little further use. Dave --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
