Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

Scanning Documents

Faxing isn’t the only technology that turns paper into digital bits. Scanning is the other—and that, too, is a talent of Windows Fax and Scan.

First, install your scanner (and its driver) as described in Chapter 20.

Load it up with the page you want to scan. In Fax and Scan, click New Scan. The New Scan dialog box appears. Click Preview to trigger a quick, temporary scan so that you can see how the document will look after the scan (Figure 19-13). If it all looks good, click Scan.

Figure 19-13. In this box, you have the chance to specify what sort of thing you want to scan—picture? document?—and specify its resolution and color settings. Choose 300 to 600 dots per inch resolution (dpi) for professional scans; for everyday scanning, 150 to 200 dpi is plenty. The more dots, the bigger the resulting file.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Scanning Text—and then Editing It

I scanned an article from a magazine. How do I copy a couple of paragraphs from it into my word processor?

When you scan an article or a page of a book, you’re not capturing text; you’re just taking a picture of text. You can no more copy and paste a paragraph out of the resulting graphics file than you can copy text out of a photograph. Your PC sees everything on the scanned page as one gigantic graphic. If you want to edit text you’ve scanned, then you need optical character recognition (OCR) software, which ...