acrobat 9 standard & scanning

Yes. You can see a comparison of the different Acrobat (and Reader) products here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/matrix.php

simmie,
If other users are working with Adobe Reader you will have to "enable" the PDF.
I believe that this would call for the Professional version of Acrobat.

Images of textual content will not be "editable" as-is. You will likely want to use Acrobat's Clear Scan as the OCR method.

Be well...

you can't edit a scanned document with Acrobat. To edit a scanned image (say, a b/w document where you wanted to remove blemishes or text or whatever) you need an image (bit map) editor like Photoshop Elements, just to name one. One way is to scan the page to photoshop at black/white 300 dpi (set scanner' to line art or 2 bit, or b/w, whichever term is offered by your scanner's interface). Now you can edit the image (bit map). Save as PDF. Open in Acrobat and insert your text notes using Acrobat's comment & markup tools.

so i could just use ocr software and then edit the document with word or something like that, then save that to a pdf if need be? does the acrobat standard include ocr software that would allow me to do this? or am i better off buying a specific ocr software? besides the editing, say if i can do the ocr stuff and edit the document and then save it as a pdf can i set it up that i can then send that file to someone with just the acrobat pdf reader and allow them to just type text in certain areas and beable to save that form with the text they typed but not have them beable to change anything else on the document?

thanks again for your time and input its really helping me out i dont want to spend the money on the software and find out later that i cant do what i need to do with it.

simmie

simmie,
You allude to a "form" as something you would send to others in the PDF format.
If a "form" PDF is what you want then you may want to consider the Professional version of Acrobat
(for LiveCycle Designer as well as Acrobat Forms) or a third party application (e.g., ABBYY, IRIS, or Nuance to mention a few).

Generic scan applications out of the 'brown paper bag' typically don't have the "extra" of form recognition.
You get the TIFF which can be brought into some other application (MS Office, Acrobat, etc.).
Along the way you may have to do OCR. However, OCR output is often not the easiest content to "edit".
Sometime ago I used ABBY to scan a paper form into Word. The Word file contained renderable text and much of the form's layout.
Took a bit of clean up to get what I wanted and then went to PDF. So, its a doable thing.

If you brought the scanned image into, say MS Word, you could do whatever clean up you deem necessary.
Then setup the "form". Output to PDF and post-process the PDF form as needed.

For user with Adobe Reader you would use Acrobat Professional to "enable" the PDF for use by Reader.

An alternative for forms, if you've web space, may be be to do a "web form".

Be well...

so i could just use ocr software and then edit the document with word or something like that, then save that to a pdf if need be?
answer: NO, you are starting with an scanned image, which can not be edited in a word processor even if the image PDF is OCR'd

does the acrobat standard include ocr software that would allow me to do this?
answer: NO, but Acrobat pro and std include an OCR tool that lays OCR data with the image, but it is not a general purpose OCR tool.

am i better off buying a specific ocr software?
answer: NO. For general purpose OCR see Microsoft document imaging, which comes bundled with MS Office

can I then send that file to someone with just the acrobat pdf reader and allow them to just type text in certain areas and be able to save that form with the text they typed
answer: YES, by enabling commenting for Reader users with Acrobat Pro and Acrobat 9 Std (assuming that "form" means any document)

but not have them be able to change anything else on the document?
answer: NO, anyone with Photoshop can import the image PDF and remove pixels, just was noted in a previous post