Using Your Scanner - Part 1

Don Bradbury looks at some of the uses to which you can put a flatbed scanner

Not so long ago a flatbed scanner would cost you an arm and a leg. Now they're so inexpensive, and so useful, that they are routinely added to many PC package deals. Perhaps you got such a deal recently and wondered what you'd use the flatbed scanner for? The question has been posed to me by members of my own family. Here are a few ideas.

First, what is the scanner?

A flatbed scanner lets you feed into it any flat object in order to obtain a facsimile of the object in two dimensions, either on the screen or ultimately on paper. Usually, though, it will be an image already on paper that you're scanning. A photograph, a page of text, or a painting perhaps, the intention being to produce a duplicate of it, or to convert the image into a graphic file.

Why would you want to make a graphic file out of a picture? Well, a frequent aim is to email it to someone. Or you might want to include the picture in a document of your own creation, say a word processing or desk top publishing document.

To attach a copy of the picture to an email message, you need to have the image in one of the supported graphic file formats. Your scanner will be set up to produce a standard format file, possibly the popular JPG format, or perhaps BMP, but you could convert it into any one of several formats, the optimum choice depending on the end use you have in mind.

More technical

But I digress. The flatbed scanner has a glass plate, usually standard A4 size or a little larger, onto which you place the image to copy, face down. Then, when you initiate the scan via your scanner's software (or in some cases, hardware), a source of illumination traverses the image and the image ends up in a form that can be understood by PCs (0s and 1s, the digital format).

The software you will have bought with your scanner grabs the image and puts it onto the screen, offering to let you tweak it in a variety of ways if you want to. It then asks if you want to save the image to disk, either your built-in hard disk or a floppy. Give the file an easily remembered name (in the dialogue box on the screen), and hit the Enter key. Take a look through the software's manual to see in what ways you can manipulate the image you scanned if the result is not to your liking.

That image might already be in a fit state to email to someone, but that's most unlikely. The reason is that it'll almost certainly be too big a file, demanding a huge time online to transmit, and, perhaps even more important, a huge time to receive. You can lose friends by squirting large files down the phone line to them! You can do something about file size from the start by selecting, as one of your scanning options, a lower resolution.

Resolution

The resolution of the typical flatbed may vary from less than 100dpi to 9600dpi or much higher, and a default of 360dpi might be offered. The higher the scanning resolution, the sharper and more true to life (ie detailed) your resultant image will be, but the file size which that entails might be entirely inappropriate for your needs.

If you have a photo to email, try the lowest setting the scanner permits, perhaps 70dpi. When you have the file saved, save it also to a floppy disk for convenience, load Windows Explorer, log onto the A: drive, and take a look at the number of bytes involved in the file. If it's over 100K it's probably too large to email and you'll have to reduce it.

Your scanner software will usually let you reduce the file size by compressing it (removing information from it sufficient to reduce its size significantly without destroying it completely). Alternatively, and probably additionally, you can load other, more specialised software, such as the popular Paint Shop Pro, to both manipulate the image and convert it into a format more suitable for emailing.

A trial version of Paint Shop Pro can be obtained from the manufacture's web site (www.jasc.com), or it's often to be found on magazine cover CDs. Watch out for it.

In conclusion

Next time I'll look at scanning for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), in which typed script can be converted to text that's editable and saveable on your computer, plus other uses of the flatbed scanner. Hang in there; it's all good and useful stuff. You'll be glad you got that flatbed when we've finished.

 

Don Bradbury