Does anyone here have any experience with scanning printed forms and documents into searchable, editable text?

I would like to begin scanning a shelf full of printed material into electronic form so I can use and archive it as an electronic database.

I'm nervous about:
- its scanning accuracy
- compatability with generally accepted doc formats
- being able to import it into my outliner or PIM of choice.

Any comments and/or recommendations would be most welcome.

TIA

Jack

A few years ago that I got involved in this ABBYY's FineReader Pro ( http://www.abbyy.com/ ) was the best OCR software re scanning forms, including comprehending Greek letters.

As far as I know the choice is now wider; in fact ABBYY seem to have a dedicated program themselves.

Such software offers a good choice of database export formats. Anyway,
I wouldn't really worry about formats now that MS Office is XML aware; you can even use it as an intermediate step to convert to RTF or whatever your PIM will read.

What you need to test for yourself though is scanning accuracy as it takes some fine tuning.

alx