MS Office Formatting – ‘Latin (Helvetica)’ Format in Word 2016 on High Sierra

Yes, that sort of formatting sounds like what can happen when your OCR software is set to interpret what it has scanned, when in fact you really just need the plain text for applying styles.

A long time ago on a Windows system, we had to recover an electronic document from the sole remaining printed copy that we had. The software had a marquee feature, where it would:

1. Scan the page and show you the preview
2. Allow you to draw rectangular marquees over the portions that you were interested in (this was a convenient tool for ignoring scan fragments)
3. Produce text fields that contain the scanned text
4. Provide a button that would copy the text to the Clipboard

The thing about copying to the clipboard, if you clicked the button, then some interpreting took place that introduced passable formatting, but you no longer had plain text.

However, in step (3), if you drag-selected the text within the paragraph field and manually copied to clipboard, then you'd get plain text, for which to was easier to assign styles.

With respect to Mac software, try a demo for the latest Adobe Acrobat, and see if it can do a decent job doing OCR on a screenshot/scan of those Word files.

This worked for me:

You may wish to update your Normal template as well. To do so:

• Open the Normal.dotm template (Note: You MUST navigate to the Normal template using the File menu in Word, and choose "Open". Don't try it from the Finder or you will make a copy of Normal each time.)
• Close all other documents (this is important...if you don't, Word holds a hidden instance of the old version open).
• Change the paper size.
• Add and remove a space from the text (to force Word to save the document)
• Save the Normal template. (If Word prompts you for a file name, you did not open the file correctly and you now have a copy that is not a template. Cancel out and start again...)
• Close Word.

Should be good when you re-open.