One of the key features of MODI is its ability to take a scanned document, pull the text from it, and convert it into a Word document. It can do this with typewritten or handwritten documents.

Take a look at this sample:

We’ve scanned a document into MODI and we now want it as a text document that we can edit.

The first thing we would do would be to ask MODI to go through the document and convert it using Optical Character Recognition). This command is found under the Tools menu within MODI.

Once you click this command, you’ll see the following dialog:

(If there is no text that needs to be recognized in the document, this dialog will not appear.)

This dialog lets you choose what pages to recognize: the selected pages, pages with no OCR information, or all pages. You can also click the Options button to customize the recognition:

In this case, the Options dialog box defaults to the OCR tab as it’s the only tab that applies during this process. You can see that there are four options in this tab: enable/disable auto rotate; enable/disable auto straighten; set the OCR language, and change Windows indexing service options.

Once we click OK to this dialog box and click OK to the Recognize Text Using OCR dialog box, MODI will go through the process of recognizing the scanned text.

Once it’s finished that process, we’ll click the Tools menu again and click Send Text To Word…. If you didn’t recognize the text first, you will be prompted to do so. If you already told MODI to recognize the text, you’ll see the dialog pictured to the right.

This dialog lets you choose what text will be placed in the new document, whether or not pictures will be maintained, and where MODI will output the .htm file (the default format for converting files).

Click OK and the process will begin. Once it’s complete, your scanned image will be placed in a new Word document as text:

You can see that the document still needs some work and some formatting, but it’s a good starting point; much better than trying to retype a complicated nine-page document.