Using the scanner to get text

Tina came in today wanting to know how to use the scanner. "Aha!" I thought, "Finally an easy question."

Because of course i'd already made a "how to document" for using the flatbed scanner in the teachers' room. I just need to remember where i've saved the file ^_^

How wrong i was.

Just as well i looked for the file, because i needed to read it in order to remember how do use the scanner. It's not intuitive by any stretch of anyone's imagination. Scanners are rarely intuitive - especially on windows machines.

Here's what we discovered:

1) Open "Computer", also known as "Windows Explorer" or "My computer"
2) Find & start the Scanner & camera wizard
3) Put your scanned file into optical character recognition (OCR).

This last step was broken because for some reason the "microsoft office document imaging service" was no longer installed on this machine. Fortunately i could re-install it without needing administration super-powers.

And bingo. 25 minutes later we have the power to scan text from a document.

NB usually scanners just get image files. For this project Tina needed the actual text, which is more difficult and needs extra software to do the "optical character recognition (OCR)" business.

Relevant Links: here's the document in PDF format.

PS: you can also use the photocopier for ordinary image scanning. Fraser & Maria made a set of instructions for this .. look on the wall near the copier.

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Photo by Archaeobobalist (creative commons at flickr).