Q:

Is there a way to have Microsoft Office Document Imaging capture the document's layout?

I am trying to scan a packet of information into a series of Word docs.  The first few pages are part of an index.  It's laid out like this:

Article VIII                                     13
    Section 1 .... Notice of Association         13
    Section 2 .... Notice of Unpaid Assessments  13
    Section 3 .... Notice of Other Notices       13
Article IX                                       14
    Section 1 .... Conflict of Interest          14
    Section 2 .... Blah blah                     15

When I open the scanned .TIF in MODI and copy/paste it into Word, it looks like this:

ARTICLE I.
Sect ion
Section
Sect ion
Sect ion
Sec;ion
Section
Section
Section
Section
Section
Sect ion
Section
ARTICLE II
Section 1.
Section 2.
Section 3.
Section 4.

Basically, it seems to convert whitespace and consecutive periods into carriage returns.  If it could at least maintain the position of sections of text by using tabs or spaces then that would be at least somewhat awesome.

A:

For as far as I know, MS Document imaging cannot capture the layout of an document, but these products can:

Royalty Free OCR - Free, nice tool.
NewOCR - free, online.
ABBYY FineReader - really awesome software, but isn't cheap. It has trial though.

