[Snoopers-868th]

I hope I have provided enough information. LOL I didn't want to leave anything out.

[ConservativeMind]

You would do best with a PC-based solution using Omnipage 15 or Omnipage 15 Professional.

Take a look at your needs between them. You would likely qualify for an upgrade of some sort, assuming your scanner came with any form of OCR package.

[ShadowAce]

Tech Support ping

[ShadowAce]

Does anyone have an idea that will utilize the mixed data (pictures & text--Word 2002) to yield a secure, readable and searchable format for use on both the Mac or PC that can be burned to CD?

Open Office will read in MS Office files and you can then export them as PDF. OOo is free for the download.

[HAL9000]

The Abbyy OCR software included free with some scanners can output some reasonably good WYSIWYG-style OCR format in RTF format. MS Word can open the RTF format and display text and images with the original layout. I've been using it to help Mrs. HAL9000 convert her recipes to text format.

Macs have built-in PDF file generation capability in all software applications, through the Print command.

[ConservativeMind]

About printing PDF alone from Office, you can download the free open source program called PDFCreator. Get the version with GhostScript. The current version is 0.9.1.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

[ConservativeMind]

If you have only paper copies, let Omnipage rescan them with its own settings, as your TIF scans may not be of optimal resolution and/or color/gray scale depth.

Remember, OCR is not 100% accurate. What can be converted will be searchable, what can't will remain a picture with the text in it for you to still view, but not search.

OCR programs do what they can to retain your original format, but they aren't perfect.

[Auntie Mame]

The way I make PDFs from text is searchable, at least on my 'puter. Here's what I did to check, just now. On this very thread, I went up to file, print, and then changed my printer to Adobe PDF, then printed (make sure you indicate where you want it saved because if you don't, like anything, you won't be able to find it). Name it, too, unless you like the name it makes for itself. When you print to the Adobe PDF printer, you're not really printing, you're creating a PDF. Then, if it doesn't open all by itself, which mine did, go to it, open it, and see if you can search it. This is what I did just now with this thread to check it. And it worked perfectly. And it took seconds.

[ikka]

What you want is a program that will do the following:

1. Scan the image.

2. OCR the image

3. Allow you to save the text as a PDF

In my testing, I have found that ScanSoft OmniPage has the needed features. Once you scan and OCR, you can save the PDF in a format they call something like "text with overlay".

This places the actual scanned image, directly overlaid on top of the text as it was OCR'ed. Thus, if you full-text index a group of PDFs, or if you open a particular PDF and search for text, you will be given the text, but, it will look like the original document.

Any marks or graphics that are not recognized by the OCR engine, can still be seen, but not searched on (they are saved in the graphics overlay part, which you look at).

I hope I explained this well enough ...

[Swordmaker]

Do you have a friend with a Mac with Microsoft Word?

OS X Macs use PDF display technology so it is extremely easy to produce an accurate PDF document.

Copy your document into Mac MS Word... You can email it, transfer it with a USB thumb drive, whatever.

Now print it as a PDF file... done.

It is searchable on the Mac.