BASICS OF SCANNING, PART TWO (Scanning Text)

Scanning Text

A document can be scanned and converted to a text document using a utility known as Optical Character R ecognition (OCR). The document is treated as an image, OCR will decipher the image character by character thus producing a text document. The OCR utility can be found in the DeskScan group and is titled Omni Page Direct

Steps For Scanning Text

To scan and convert to a document is quite a simple process. The steps are as follows;

From the DeskScan group, start Omni Page Direct with a double mouse click. With starting this utility, you will notice that three icons appear at the bottom of the monitor screen. They are:
- Omni Page Direct - for setting options
- ScanManager - user has no control
- HP Accupage - user has no control
One click on this new Omni Page Direct icon will call for a menu of various controls such as; Scanner....Choice, Spelling......On/Off, etc. These are currently configured and do not need to be changed.

From Microsoft Office Group, start Microsoft Word 6.0c with a double mouse click.

Verify that the document to be scanned is on the scanning tray.

Move mouse pointer to the upper most, left corner of the Word 6.0c window. Click once in the box to show another menu which contains an item "Scan Text..." and select it. From here, another menu appears......

Click on one of the icons to toggle between full page and partial page and the other set of icons to toggle between a single page and multiple pages.
Choosing the Options button will allow you to set the parameters of the document being scanned, which include:
- the size
- the orientation
- the document type - fully formed for most, or dot matrix for documents which have been printed on an eight pin printer.
- the page layout - automatic sensing, no parsing, or single table/ column (such as a newspaper column format).
If you toggled for multiple pages, be sure to set the "Pause after every page" option.

Choose "OK" to set the parameters and you are ready to scan the document.

The scanned image will appear in a window that also contains limited tools for zooming in/out, selecting an area, etc. If you toggled for a partial page, then choose the select tool from the tool bar then click and drag over the area of interest.

Click the "Recognize" button and the OCR utility will convert the image to a text format. From my experience, the OCR works quite well, but you should not rely 100% on it. Some minimal editing may be necessary.

To save the text output as a straight ASCII text file instead of as a MS Word document, choose "Save As..." from the File menu of MS Word, and select the DOS Text with Line Breaks file type.

Return to Scanning Part One

Created by Mouse

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