I’d like to scan a document containing tables and text into Librecalc or at best LibreWriter. I don’t see any answers relating to scanning documents in here. Is it even possible from either of these programs?
Also, on that note, you will need an OCR program to convert the scanned image to text.
I have had impressive results with Tesseract - on Linux it works quite well as a command-line utility, and on Windows there is a program called FreeOCR which uses the Tesseract engine to recognize the characters.
I have used it in my office for the electronic filing of a great number of older procedure documents only available on paper from before the introduction of our document management system.
with this if you are using Windows most scanners will come bundled with Abby Fine Reader which should allow you to scan directly to ether .txt or .rtf
In LibO there is no ability of scanning documents. Use your scanner bundled software and save documents in any “office” format. Then use LibO to open documents.
I found it was possible to use a third party program to scan into LibreCalc. I used PaperPort 12 to scan a series of documents into the program itself. I got it with my new printer. PaperPort allows you to add programs like LibreCalc and drop scanned documents into them. For the most part the data was there in similar order and correlation to the original document tables but a lot of it was scrambled. I like the possibility that maybe scanning the same documents into a text format might work and need to look into that further. There are other issues with LibreCalc I don’t like such as the way I can’t copy or move cells via handles on the cells the way I could do in MS Excel. That’s an editing issue not a scanning issue. I believe the problem of scanning into LibreOffice programs is solved for me at the very least.