Using Your Scanner - Part 2

Following his introduction to flatbed scanning, Don Bradbury looks at OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR), one of many wonderful capabilities of a modern computer, is probably one of the options you were presented with in your scanner software package. OmniPage, TextBridge, or something similar, may well have been provided. If not, the software is not too expensive. But what's it all about?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR), one of many wonderful capabilities of a modern computer, is probably one of the options you were presented with in your scanner software package. OmniPage, TextBridge, or something similar, may well have been provided. If not, the software is not too expensive. But what's it all about?

Well, say you are given several sheets of typed paper, the information on which you want to either include in another document, more or less as it is, or to edit it first, possibly to bring it up to date or to add something crucial.

You could, of course, just reconstruct the document from scratch on your PC, but far easier and quicker is to let your scanner and it's software do the donkey work. Pop the first sheet of paper on the scanner's glass plate, face down, fire up your OCR application, set the scanner resolution to something appropriate, say 150dpi, and watch the scanned page appear on your screen as if by magic.

The question of accuracy

When you've completed an OCR scan, take a look at what you get. No OCR program is guaranteed to be 100% accurate - or to put it another way, you'll be very lucky to escape having no corrections to make - but a decent OCR program will help you by automatically spell-checking the text and marking any words in doesn't recognise.

Make those corrections manually, reformat the page if you need to, and the job is done. It's ready for whatever you want to do with it.

Process it

If it's simple text, load it into your favourite word processor and see how you can now edit it, just as if you had typed it in yourself. When that's finished, save the file under a suitable filename, and in a place on your disk that you'll remember, and then do with it what you will.

You might, for example, want to paste in a graphic, or add a table of data. Take a look at other Beginner's Guides to see how you do that. You might want to add some subtitles, or simply change the font. Do that as you would in any word processed document. Then complete the remainder of the pages in the same manner.

Copy it

These days you can also get software that lets your flatbed scanner act as a photocopier, apparently (though not actually) bypassing the computer, putting a copy of what's being scanned straight to your printer. Data Becker's Colour Copier was one such that we've looked at in these pages in the past. I still use it and find it very convenient.

In conclusion

Don't feel hog-tied in terms of what you can achieve with a scanner. Let your imagination loose and see what you can come up with. But all the standard processes of the flatbed are useful; spend a few hours one evening just experimenting a little. Yes, you'll certainly be glad you bought that scanner.

 

Don Bradbury