Portable scanner to text for ubuntu 12.04

[John Hupp]

On 1/23/2014 10:51 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 23 January 2014 15:49, Don Parsons <dfp10 at verizon.net> wrote:
>> I mean a portable (strip shaped) scanner where the software includes OCR to
>> scan to text.  I tried to install an old Epson Perfection 1640SU and an old
>> Plustek OpticSlim M12 scanner into Ubuntu 12.04 and failed.
>
> Please bottom-quote on mailing lists.
>
> How do you mean you tried to install them? Most scanners are just
> plug-in-and-go. Ensure it's connected and turned on before you boot
> Ubuntu.
>
> Or are you trying to install Windows driver software on Linux? That
> will definitely *not* work.
>

Scanner support, if available, is often plug-and-play via SANE. Support 
is widespread with USB and with many SCSI scanners, but thin with 
parallel-port scanners.

But scanning, per se, just produces an image.

To convert that to text, you need OCR.  I do not currently know of any 
functional open source OCR software for Linux.  But I would be happy to 
be told that there is some.