[unstresst]

I've been all over my scanner program and can't find a way to save a scanned documnt to text file--(Word or notepad)
I know it's possible because I did it once on our last scanner.
I stumbled on a way to 'paste' a form of the document to Word, but it was a massive jumble of wierd symbols.

[cwwozniak]

Did your newer scanner come with any kind of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. That is what you need to convert a scanned picture of the text into text that can be understood and used by other software.

Some versions of MS-Office give you the option of installing Document Scanning and Document Imaging utilities that allow you to convert scanned documents into a Word document with editable text. I know that these utility programs are available with MS-Office 2003.

[baladio]

I also saw some free OCR programs:
http://www.freeocr.net/
http://www.simpleocr.com/
You could save the scanned pix and (after converting if needed) use the free OCR programs to convert them into text files. If you don't have the program to convert to the necessary format(s), you can download many utilities for converting between formats.

[unstresst]

SOLVED

Found an easy to use online converter.
They ask for an email address, but you can still aquire converted file without it.
once you've clicked 'convert' , scroll down to see your download link---(might take up to a few minutes)
http://www.freepdfconvert.com/convert_pdf_to_source.asp