This week’s reader question.

I think what you are talking about is what is call “optical character recognition” software. OCR is the software that takes the image of a document from the scanner, reads the text in the image, and then translates the image into characters.

OCR is needed because a scanner captures an image or an electronic picture. If you took that image and put it into your word processor, it would appear as an image and not text.

The OCR software takes that image, scans the image looking for text or characters and then translates and places text into you document.

OCR software is available commercially but can be found for free. A free OCR program that I use and recommend is SimpleOCR. SimpleOCR can be downloaded at http://www.simpleocr.com/Download.asp.

SimpleOCR is easy to install and use. Just download, install and follow the instructions and start scanning documents that you can edit and save in your word processor.

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