Using the Scanner at the Project Workstation in Jones Hall

1.       Make sure scanner is turned on (the “Ready” light should be solid green). 
2.       Double-click the “EPSON Scan” icon on the Desktop.
3.       The “Mode” menu in the upper right corner of the window should be set to “Office Mode”.
4.       Under “Image type”, select “Color”, “Grayscale”, or “Black & White” as needed.
5.       Under “Size”, select “Letter(8.5 x 11 in.)” for standard-size pages, and  “A3(11.7 x 16.5 in.)” for larger ones.
6.       Under “Orientation”, select the orientation of the page on the scanner (portrait or landscape).  For large pages, the only option is landscape.
7.       Make sure the “Text Enhancement” checkbox is selected.
8.       Click the “Preview” button to see a basic preview. You can select a specific part of the page and click the “Zoom” button to see that part in detail.
9.       Click “Scan”.  This will open the “File Save Settings” window.
10.    Under “Location”, click “Other: Desktop”, or click “Browse…” to choose another location (such as your USB drive).  Note that items left on the Desktop overnight may be deleted.
11.    Under “Image Format”, select the image type.  Common types are “JPEG” (small file size, good quality) and “TIFF” (large file size, excellent quality).  For PDF files see below.
12.    Click “OK”. If scanning a single sheet, be sure to close the scanner lid to block outside light.

Editing Images

To edit JPEG images, double-click on the image to open the Windows Photo Gallery application.  Use the icons at the bottom of the screen to resize and rotate the image.   Click the “Fix” icon at the top of the screen to crop the image and adjust the color and image quality.  Click “Burn” to burn the image to a CD/DVD.   Printing is not available from the project workstation. 

When you close the program, your changes will automatically be saved.    If you do not wish to undo all of your changes, select “Revert to Original” from the “File” menu. 

TIFF files open in Photoshop by default. You can open a TIFF file in another application by right-clicking on the file, selecting “Open With…”, then selecting the desired application.

Creating PDFs

Select “PDF” under “Image Format” in step 11.  Make sure that the paper size and orientation displayed under “Details” are the same as what you selected in steps 5 and 6 (click “Options…” to change these settings).  Click “Add page” after scanning for additional pages.  When you have scanned all pages, click “Edit page” to see images of all your pages.  You can rotate pages using the green arrows at the bottom of the window.  When done, click “OK”. 

PDFs can also be created with Adobe Acrobat (this is a bit simpler than the EPSON tool).  Simply click the Adobe Acrobat icon on the Desktop, then click “Create PDF”, and then “Create PDF from scanner”.  Select “WIA-EPSON Expression 10000XL” from the “Scanner” drop-down, and make sure the resolution, etc. is to your liking.  Acrobat will prompt you to scan additional pages if desired.

Making PDFs Searchable and Selectable with OCR

Adobe Acrobat 8 has the ability to apply OCR to documents in East Asian languages.  After applying OCR, you can search the full text of your documents, as well as copy and paste text into other documents.

When the “Acrobat Scan” dialog appears, make sure that the “Make Searchable (Run OCR)” checkbox near the bottom of the window is checked.  Click the “Options” button next to this checkbox, and select the language of the document from “Primary OCR Language”.  Note that Simplified and Traditional Chinese have separate entries in this menu.

After creating the PDF document, you should be able to select and search text.  OCR can also distinguish between horizontal and vertical text.  The text selection cursor should appear sideways when you place the mouse near vertical text.

Before scanning a long document with OCR, scan one page and test the accuracy of the OCR by copying and pasting some text into a word processor.  You may find that you need to adjust the resolution of the scanner to get more accurate results.  The proper settings depend a lot on the nature of the document.  If the resolution is set too low, the OCR will have a hard time making out complex characters.  If it is set too high, then extraneous marks or text from the opposite side of the page may be accidentally included in the OCR.  As a starting point, you could try scanning in grayscale at 600dpi with brightness set to -20 and contrast set to 0.  However, you may need to readjust these settings several times to get good results from the OCR.

You can also apply OCR to PDFs that have already been created.  Simply open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat, then open the “Document” menu and select “OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text Using OCR…”.  The OCR language can be adjusted if necessary by clicking the “Edit…” button.

The EPSON Scan tool allows you to make finer adjustments to the image quality than Acrobat does, so you may want to create the PDF using the EPSON tool, then apply OCR in Acrobat afterwards.