Word Processing

Assignment 12

Using the Scanner

The scanner is a computer tool that serves two main purposes:

1.  To scan printed documents

2.  To scan images

Printed Documents - Scanners come with a program that is called an OCR Program.  This stands for "Optical Character Recognition", and means that your scanner can read a printed document.  Printed is emphasized here because a scanner can only recognize typed or printed pages.  It can not recognize script or handwriting.   The OCR program "reads" your printed page and can send the results to your Word Processor such as Word.  Once this is accomplished the document is yours, just like you were creating a new one in your Word Processor.  You can edit the document, change the fonts, delete sections or add new information.

There are advantages to saving a printed document as a Word file rather than a graphic file.  One has already been mentioned, i.e., you can edit the file and change or update it.  Also, Word Processing files take much less space on your hard drive or storage disk than do graphic files.  We will demonstrate this in our exercise.

Images - The scanner can also store graphic images.  Thus you can scan pictures from magazines, your photographs, or handwritten pages as graphic files.  Generally, you will save black and white images as tiff or gif files, and color images as jpg files. 

Remember - Your computer at home will probably use different keystrokes to accomplish what we are doing in these exercises.  Read your instructions for your scanner programs.  The thought process will be the same, i.e., you will scan text or an image into your programs and store them as either text or an image file.

Exercise 1-Scanning Text -

• Use the sample document provided.  This will serve as our scanning source for the exercises

• Open the scanner top and place the printed page in the upper left hand corner of the scanning bed

• Close the scanner lid

• Click Start (Lower Left Hand Corner of your screen) -> Programs ->HP Precision Scan (Remember, this is our scanning program at COA, yours may be different)

• In the dialog box that results select Scan to Word with the drop down arrow.  This tells the scanner that you are working with printed text and want to use the OCR part of the scanner

• Leave "Select Parts of Page/View Page" turned on (check mark in box).  This is the language on our scanner that tells the scanner to preview your document.  Your scanner at home may say "Preview" or "PreScan" instead.

• Turn off "Scan in Color" (uncheck the box). There is no need to scan black and white text in color.  It will save storage space on your hard drive to store it only in black and white.

• Click "SCAN" and the scanner turns itself on and examines the page.  The resulting page shows the "zones" of how the scanner and OCR program see the page

• With the Select Button at the top of the page, choose "Select -> Entire Page"

• Then press "Settings -> Region Type -> Text and press the OK Button.  This step assures that the entire page and all of the zones are read as text, and not as a picture of text

• Now press "Accept" and the document will be analyzed and sent to your Word Program.

Notice -  The scanner will do a pretty good job of reading text.  If you have a dedicated program such as OmniPage, it will do a very good job of recognizing text.  But, it will not always be perfect.  You will usually have to check and edit the text.

Notice - All of the fonts in the various zones may not be the same.  You may have to select some words or whole sentences to change fonts to keep your documents consistent.  Some words may have to be analyzed and edited to correct spelling errors.

Note: -  You can change the fonts in your documents all at once to a consistent style and size by using the edit menu and your font style and size controls.  You can use the Edit menu to Select All.  This will highlight your entire document.  You can then use the Font Style and Size controls on your toolbar to make your document all the same.  Be Careful after making this change.  Remember if you press the Enter Key, you will delete everything.  Click anywhere on your page on your screen to deselect the whole document so that you can not delete everything with one keystroke.

Note:  Once again, if you have a dedicated scanning program, it will require different keystrokes to accomplish the tasks we just performed.  Read your instructions.  Some will actually check spelling of questionable words as it translates the scanned information to your Word document and ask you to either accept or edit the words in question as it progresses.

Exercise 1-Scanning Text - (Continued)

• Save the document to your personal folder as Scandoc1

• Close the Window for the scanning program

• Go to your personal folder in My Documents and find the Scandoc1 that you just saved

• Right click on the Scandoc1 file (without opening it)

• Click on Properties.  Notice how much space the document requires on your hard drive.  It should be about 8 Kb or 8000 bytes of information

• Write down the size of this file

• Open the file by double clicking on it and take a look at your work.

Exercise 2-Scanning An Image

•  Open the HP Scanning Program again

• Turn on the scan in color box by making sure the check mark is on

• Select "Scan to Image File" from the drop down menu.  This lets the scanner know that you are working with a "Photo"-type image.

• Scan the same document (Now you are scanning the same document as an image or picture, not as text to be read by OCR)

• Press Accept

• Save it to your Personal Folder as Scandoc2 (Notice this time it is a bitmap, i.e., image or picture file)

• Open Scandoc2 from your personal folder

Notice  - You can not click between the letters in the document.  You can not select any of the words or sentences.  This is because we saved the document as a picture, not as a text document.  It is essentially a photograph stored in your computer.  Note also it is a perfect reproduction of your page, but it can not be edited.  If you were to print this file, it would look exactly like your source document.

• In your Personal Folder, right click on Scandoc2 and look at the properties again.  Notice the image file requires about 800Kb or 800,000 bytes of space to be stored on your hard drive. 

So, how much more space does it take to store the same document as an image instead of a Word text document.  About 100 times.  Think about it, you can store 100  pages of text in the same space that it takes to store one picture.

Once again, your own scanning program on your computer at home may act different than the one we use here in this classroom.  But, it will think the same.  Study it to efficiently use your program.

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