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Scanning Paper Documents

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You can scan a paper document and recognize the resulting image in ABBYY FineReader 12. Complete the following steps to scan an image.

  1. Make sure that the scanner is properly connected to your computer and turn it on.

When connecting a scanner to your computer, follow the instructions in the scanner's manual or other accompanying documentation, and make sure you install the software that comes with the scanner. Some scanners have to be turned on before the computer they are connected to.

  1. Place the page you want to scan in the scanner. You can place multiple pages if your scanner is equipped with an automatic document feeder. Try to make sure that the pages in the scanner are positioned as straight as possible. The document may be converted incorrectly if the text on the scanned image is skewed too much.
  2. Click the Scan button or click Scan Pages… on the File menu.

In the scanning dialog box, specify the scanning settings and scan the document. The resulting images will be displayed in the Pages window.

Note: If a FineReader document is already open, newly scanned pages will be appended to the end of this document. If there is no open FineReader document, a new one will be created from these pages.

Tip: If you need to scan documents that were printed on a regular printer, use the grayscale mode and a resolution of 300 dpi for best results.

Recognition quality depends on the quality of the hardcopy document an on the settings used when the document was scanned. Low image quality may adversely affect recognition, so specifying the correct scanning settings and taking the characteristics of the source document into account is important.

Brightness settings

If the brightness was specified incorrectly in the scanning settings, a message prompting you to change the brightness setting will appear during recognition. Scanning some documents in black-and-white mode may require additional brightness adjustments.

Complete the following steps to change the brightness setting:

  1. Click the Scan button.
  2. Specify the brightness in the dialog box that opens.

Note: The standard brightness setting (50%) works in most cases.

  1. Scan the image.

If the resulting image contains many defects such as letters blending together or becoming disjointed, refer to the table below for recommendations on how to get a better image.

Problems with the image Recommendations
Text like this is ready for recognition and no adjustments need to be made.

Characters are disjointed, too bright and too thin.
  • Decrease the brightness to make the image darker
  • Use the grayscale scanning mode (brightness is adjusted automatically in this mode)

Characters blend together and become distorted because they are too dark and thick.
  • Increase the brightness to make the image lighter
  • Use the grayscale scanning mode (brightness is adjusted automatically in this mode)

What to do if you see a message prompting you to change the resolution

Recognition quality depends on the resolution of the document image. Low image resolutions (below 150 dpi) may have a negative impact on recognition quality, while images with excessively high image resolutions (over 600 dpi) do not yield any significant improvements in recognition quality and take a long time to process.

The message prompting you to change the image's resolution can appear if:

  • The resolution of the image is less than 250 dpi or greater than 600 dpi.
  • If the image has a non-standard resolution. For example, some faxes have a resolution of 204 by 96 dpi. For best recognition results, the vertical and horizontal resolutions of the image must be the same.

Complete the following steps to change the resolution of an image:

  1. Click the Scan button.
  2. Select a different resolution in the scanning dialog box.

Note: We recommend using a resolution of 300dpi for documents that do not contain any text smaller than 10 points. Use a resolution of 400–600 dpi for text that is 9 points or smaller.

  1. Scan the image.

Tip: You can also use the Image Editor to change an image's resolution. To open the Image Editor, on the Page menu, click Edit Image…).

Scanning facing pages

When you scan facing pages of a book, both pages will appear on the same image.

To improve OCR quality, images with facing pages need to be split into two separate images. ABBYY FineReader 12 features a special mode that automatically splits such images into separate pages within the FineReader document.

Follow the instructions below to scan facing pages from a book or dual pages.

  1. Open the Options dialog box (Tools >Options…) and click the Scan/Open tab.
  2. Select the Split facing pages option in the General fixes group.

Note: For best results, make sure that the pages are oriented correctly when you scan them and enable the Detect page orientation option in the Scan/Open tab of the Options dialog box.

  1. Scan the facing pages.

You can access automatic processing settings by clicking the Options… button in the Open Image dialog box (File >Open PDF File or Image…) or the scanning dialog box.

You can also split facing pages manually:

  1. Open the Image Editor (Pages > Edit Image…).
  2. Use the tools in the Split group to split the image.

See also:

1/14/2020 5:26:19 PM

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