PDF Forms Using Acrobat® and LiveCycle® Designer Bible

Chapter 6. Scanning Office Forms

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Configuring your scanner

• Using OCR to recognize text

• Creating forms from scanned documents

In Chapter 5, we talked about creating simple forms from original authoring application documents converted to PDF. Adobe has invested much development time to help novice users create rich, intelligent fillable forms. Using the Acrobat 9 features for editing a form in Form Editing mode and using auto field detection are two things that help all Acrobat users create forms with a minimal amount of work.

Adobe has received much feedback from users who have a need to convert legacy analog forms to electronic forms. In response to users' requests, Adobe has introduced in Acrobat 9 superb features for scanning paper forms and converting the scanned documents into rich intelligent forms.

With the introduction of ClearScan technology and support for Windows Imaging Architecture scanner drivers, scanning a paper form is as easy as converting original authoring documents to PDF forms. In this chapter, we cover scanning paper forms, using Acrobat's built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) features, and converting the scanned documents to fillable forms.

Setting Up Acrobat Scan

Acrobat Scan is a feature available in all commercial Acrobat viewers. While in Acrobat, you can trigger your scanner to perform a scan, and the scanned document opens in the Acrobat Document pane. In essence, the scanned image file is immediately converted to PDF when the scan is completed. ...