I need to scan, edit, and reprint a report for school and I don’t want to type it.
Does anyone knows a program that would let me scan the text and copy/paste it to MS Word for example?
Thank you!
It’s called OCR (optical character recognition), and there are several programs that can do it.
The most popular are:
Textbridge is another which actually packages with many scanners.
Many modern scanners ship with some OCR software… the Canons especially. Have you checked out what you have installed now or what’s on your installation CD. You might be surprised.
guys, scanning from a scanner is quite possible nowadays, but is it possible to extract text from a picture ?
http://www.simpleocr.com/ - A free bit of software.
I have used my digital camera to photograph a page then read it using this software. Its not great but works.
I have also tried reading some text off a digital photo; very hard to do even after changing to greyscale and messing with the contrast etc.
I use Abbyy FineReader as it was packaged with my scanner itself 
Made thousands of papers (for work purposes) and it’s very cool and accurate, also supporting many languages 
There are many OCR programs to choose from. Here is a website which has all the information about OCR software - www.ocrworld.com.