Scanners are imaging devices that allow you to capture an image from a hard copy to a computer. This process is also referred as digitizing an image. HP Scanners are currently the most popular on the market and are the ones we have at school.
HP scanners usually come with a scanning utility (ie. HP Precision Scan) that is the software interface that will be used to capture the image.
Scanning a picture:
+ Place the document in the scanner and click on New Scan. A preview scan will be displayed in the screen.
+ Select an area on the picture that you specifically need or leave it with the default to have the entire sheet scanned.
+ Select the type of output you want (ie. True Color, Grayscale, etc.)
+ Click on Save As and give your scanned picture a name and file extension. Usually, the best choices for file extensions are .JPG and .GIF, as they are supported by most applications and take less space.
Using OmniPage (Text Recognition)
OmniPage is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program that scans a page and recognizes/outputs text.
+ Place the document in the scanner and open the program.
+ Start the 1-2-3 wizard by clicking on the button.
+ Click on step1-Scan. The document will be scanned and a preview will be shown in the screen.
+ Click on step2-Recognize. The scanned document will be recognized for characters and a preview will also be displayed.
+ Click on step3-Output. Finally, you may output the recognized text to a text file program such a Notepad or Word.