Hardcopy to electronic

I have a ton of documents that are hard copies and I need to make them electronic. What is the best way to convert these. Can I scan them into say a pdf (will I beable to change the text)? Any suggestions will be great.

Thank you very much

 

Yes, you can scan them in. What format you scan them into is up to you.

Scanners can put them into a picture format or into a text format. They're better at picture formats but you will end up with a document that can't easily be edited since it will actually be a picture of the document.

To get them into text format, you need to use OCR (Optical Character Recgonition) software. Some sort of OCR software is usually bundled with most scanners.

OCR software is not 100% accurate. It will try to turn every mark on the page into a letter or number...including fingerprints, smudges from photocopiers and any other stray marks. The more formatting the document has...like forms, with boxes and lines...the less accurate OCR software tends to be. Even the top-end end OCR programs, which can cost hundreds of dollars, has this problem to varying degrees.

Whether you can put anything into PDF format depends on whether you have any software installed which can convert into PDF format.