On 28 Mar 2007 at 23:33, alan smith wrote:

> I scanned an article (menu) and saved and it went into MY DOCUMENTS as
> a PDF file. I want to modify whats in the file but I can't send it to
> wordpad, and I can't change the text. Can anyone please tell me how  I
> can work on it? 

  There are probably two issues at work here:

1.  While the "Acrobat Reader" program to decipher and display .PDF files is 
free, the creator/editor program "Acrobat" is fairly pricy.  In recent years 
a handful of free/cheap third-party editors for .PDF files have become 
available, but it is still fairly unlikely that you have anything installed 
on your machine that can edit .PDFs.

2.  .PDF documents, like Word documents and HTML web pages, can contain 
images enbedded as objects.  Your scanner probably creates a graphic image 
of the scanned material and embeds it in the .PDF document.  It's *possible* 
-- but pretty laborious -- to use an image editting program to change the 
image.  But there's no way a *text* editing program like WorkPad will even 
try.

  You almost certainly need an "OCR" (Optical Character Recognition) program 
to receive the graphical output from the scanner and apptempt to recreate it 
as a text file that can be editted by something like WordPad.  
  Under the best circumstances, such programs are not quite 100% accurate, 
but you should be able to get at least 99.5% accuracy without too much 
trouble.

David Gillett

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