Specifications

■ Print is fuzzy and lacks definition. You might have scanned the photograph at 72dpi instead of
200dpi or higher (depending on the printer). Because inkjet and laser printers have many more
dots per inch than displays do, a display-optimized scan will become very small and still lack
sharpness when printed on a printer with a higher resolution.
OCR Text Is Garbled
OCR applications, such as OmniPage, enable your scanner to convert printed pages of all types back
into computer-readable text and graphics. These programs boast remarkable accuracy when used cor-
rectly, but it’s up to you to ensure that you provide readable documents. Follow these recommenda-
tions to ensure the best results possible:
■ Check the quality of your document. Photocopies of documents scanned after handwritten notes
and highlighters were used on the original are very difficult for even the most accurate page-
recognition program to decipher.
■ Scan at a minimum of 300dpi or higher if your scanner permits it. Compare the results at 300dpi to
those at 600dpi or even higher; standardize on the resolution that provides the best results. The
higher resolutions might take a bit more time, but quality is king! You can’t recognize data that
doesn’t exist. Plus, you always can reduce the resolution of a high-resolution scanned image if
you want to use it on a Web page.
■ Check the straightness of your document. Deskew the scan, or reinsert the original and rescan it.
■ The fonts in the document might be excessively stylized—such as script, black letter Gothic, and others.
If you have a hard time telling an “A” from a “D,” for example, a page-recognition program will
have an equally difficult time trying to decipher it. If you plan to scan documents using the
same hard-to-recognize fonts frequently, consider taking the time to train your page-recognition
program to understand the new alphabet, numbers, and symbols.
■ Try manually zoning the document (drawing boxes around what you want scanned). Check the
expected data type in each zone. The program might be mistaking a graphics box for a text area
or a table for ordinary text.