Hi again everyone,

Once more i'm OCR'ing a book, and transfer the result to Word.
My goal is to keep the exact layout of each page, and Omnipage helps me perfectly for that.

The problem i have is the Word file i obtain is a collection of individual pages of slightly different sizes and margins.

And each time, due to different right and left margins, the text is never centered correctly inside the word sheet.

I have tried creating a blank document with a fixed custom size and margins and pasted in it all the created word document (with the option "match destination formatting" for pasting between documents), but it keeps matching the source formatting anyway.

I can of course center the text by visually adjusting it manually in the page or by entering the desired margins in the custom margins dialog, for each page.

But for 300 pages, it would be extremely time consuming.


Is there a way to batch process this ?

Thanks for your help.

You'll usually get better results by keeping the output in PDF format (which is usually the default).Such a PDF is searchable and you should be able to copy & paste excerpts from it into Word as & when required. Trying to export the images & text to Word won't give you the same capacity. Even though you can get the page images all nicely aligned, you'll have difficulty selecting any of it as you won't be able to see it while it's behind the images and the text is quite unlikely to align with the images the way it does in the PDF.

That said, a macro could be used to handle all the image alignments in Word, but we'd need to know the specifics.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks for the input.

I have no worries with the images associated with the text: i can resize them or move them in the word page at will.

Exporting directly to pdf isn't an option, as i will endup with exactly the same uncentered margins and slightly different page sizes as i do in word. And acrobat pro hasn't either an option to automatically center the content through cropping.

You mentioned macros: can it handle my problem of uncentered content ?

If you capture a document through a scanner using Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 (available as a free download from http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4683-adobe-acrobat-8-free.html - note the serial# mentioned there), the scans naturally occupy the full width of whatever portion of the pages you set the scanner to capture, so centring isn't an issue. And, if you then run Acrobat Pro OCR process on the resulting PDF, it will be fully searchable, the text positioning will exactly match the text in the images and can be selected through them. None of that is possible with Word.

A Word macro can do whatever image alignments you want - including different alignments on odd & even pages. However, it cannot determine the alignment according to any element within the image. So, if your scanned text within the image is misaligned from one image to the next, a macro can't help with that.

FWIW, I've exported PDFs to Word a number of times. Depending on the PDF, each line might come out as a separate physical paragraph. These are easy enough to re-join via Find/Replace. If you replace the paragraph breaks with manual line breaks, it's easier to retain the original's layout & pagination, even though you'll probably be using a different font and/or point size, line spacing, etc. Replacing the paragraph breaks with spaces (or importing PDF conversions that honour intra-paragraph line breaks with spaces) makes for easier copying, etc. later on, but it then also becomes much harder to restore the original page layouts & pagination. Even if you don't import the content via the PDF route, you'll still face all of the same issues.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]