Scanning to Microsoft Word

Scanning to Word (or other word processor) has advantages and disadvantages when compared to the option of scanning to PDF. If you're unsure of what Optical Character Recognition actually does or how it can help people with a variety of difficulties then please read my Overview of OCR.

An OCR scan to a word processor gives you a great amount of flexibility but this can have serious consequences on the layout of the page. Once your text has appeared in your word processor you can change the font size, style and colour as well as the spacing between lines and letters. This can make the text incredibly more accessible for people with visual difficulties and dyslexia - especially those who have Scotopic Sensitivity. In addition to this you can use a text-to-speech engine such as the free ReadPlease or the (better) speech incorporated into Read & Write.

There are, however, some problems that can arise from more complicated page layouts. Unlike scanning to PDF, in which layout accuracy is guaranteed as it is a fixed image rather than editable text, the layout is determined by the original page, the OCR software used, and the support of the intended layout by Microsoft Word. Also layouts can then be affected (sometimes severely) by changing the font size, spacing or even font style. Sometimes documents will repaginate (text will move onto other pages) but on other documents text could disappear 'behind the scenes'.

It should take just a few seconds to scan a page so sometimes if both layout and visual text flexibility are important to you then you should try both formats. This is especially easy if you use OmniPage as you can save the final scan in both Word Document and PDF formats without having to re-scan.