I produced a Word doc by running scanned pages through OCR software (ABBYY FineReader).



The resulting Word doc has text blocks that are too narrow. I mean, it looks like the margins are very wide. On some pages the text is a little more to the left, and on others, a little more to the right, but always too narrow.

No graphics or fancy formatting here, just simple pages from a text-only book.

I tried setting the margins to normal, and removing all indentations, and running inspect document, but to no avail.

I am viewing it in print layout. Web layout does work normally, but I need print layout.

I attached the doc, in case anyone wants to take a look.

Office 2016

edit: I know that I could paste it into a new document and choose "keep text only", but then I will lose some important formatting.

Attached Files

58 Vayeilech edit chochmo.docx (33.9 KB, 11 views)

Try saving as a .txt document and then opening in Word.

I need to preserve some formatting.

the workaround that I found is when originally scanning the book pages, not to crop the scan area, but to scan the full area, and simply block the facing page with a blank piece of paper. It is actually quicker than cropping, and the resulting Word doc can be given normal margins.

You could simply change the page setup & margins after scanning. Cropping during scanning is often useful to exclude extraneous content.

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

Your document has numerous unneeded section breaks (not unusual for OCR product). Try, in a copy of your document, replacing all of the section breaks (^b) with nothing. Then adjust the margins and get rid of the 2" gutter. Replace = Ctrl+H

Sections / Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word 2007-2013

Attached Images

00 deleteme 2.png (38.5 KB, 18 views)

after following your instructions I do see a lot of improvement.
but for some reason, I still have certain pages where the text is more to the left, and others with the text more to the right, even though I globally adjusted the margins and got rid of the big gutter.

Try also eliminating Different Even and Odd from your headers and footers.

Finally, try copying all of the text except for the final paragraph mark into a new document.

yes! eliminating different even and odd did the trick.
thanks!

Glad to have helped. BTW, I still have no idea what was going on in your document. This is one of the reasons I avoid converted documents (and OCR is definitely a conversion).