Just installed Ubuntu K-K 9.10 4 months ago, still a newbie. Got my HP PSC 1410 all-in-one hooked up and the HP Device Manager installed OK and xsane. Printer works good and scanner handles pics great but I don't have any luck scanning a menu to doc format. The menu does have fancy scroll-work around the edges and main headings are a script font and Course names are underlined. All other items are clear font. I figured this all added to the problem of very unreadable scan results till I tried a page with all clear block font and it's still totally unreadable. I mean totally! I've searched till I'm out of ideas. There has to be a way to tweak the recognition of text.

You can't scan directly to a text document, only to an image. You need to scan the page into an image format file, generally *.tiff works best. Then it has to be run through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program such as Tesseract. Your HP device probably came with a windblows program that accompliched all that but it won't work in linux unless you use virtualization of some flavor.

I don't use Ubuntu but think they should have Tesseract in their repository.

Try gscan2pdf. One pass scanning and ocr to pdf or tiff. It's in the repositories.
It has options for choosing the ocr engine (and more). Tesseract works best (at least for me), so install that from the repo as well.
"sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install tesseract gscan2pdf" should do the trick. Or use synaptic.
It has an issue with saving PDF's. I solved that long ago, but don't know how anymore (Google is your friend). To tiff works flawless.