Scanning

This is the act of converting your printed materials into a series of electronic images. OCR, Optical Character Recognition is converting the printed word into editable text in an understandable computer format. Once a document is scanned it may be edited for content, reformatted for electronic distribution, reprinted, stored on a computer server for ease of lookup or educational purposes.

Anytime you search for something on the internet someone had to make that information available to the internet, it did not just magically appear there. Most documents of historic interest have been scanned or typed in to systems around the world and now via the internet most of these documents can be viewed instantly for educational research. 

Scanners have electronic eyes measured in d.p.i. this stands for "dots per inch" the more dpi the better the image that may be achieved from your printed original. However there are limits to what can be captured. If you have ever looked at printed picture in a magazine or newspaper thru a magnifying glass you will notice the pictures are made up of hundreds or even thousands of dots. If you are scanning a magazine or equivalent type of printed material the more dpi you scan the more flaws you will find in the acquired image.

There are graphics packages which allow editing of these low resolution images, but this process is very time consuming and we all know time is money in business. For use with web sites on the internet high resolution images take very large file sizes which slow things down.

When scanning for use on the internet remember computer screen sizes, standard vga is 640 X 480, svga is 800 X 600, xga is 1024 X 768 dots if you are scanning a 4" X 6" picture, a resolution of 100 dpi will almost fill the screen of a standard vga monitor. When scanning for the internet think small and give the option for a person to click on a larger image link.