Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual

Scanning

As far as Windows XP is concerned, a scanner is just another kind of digital camera. When an XP-compatible scanner is turned on and connected to the PC, for example, the Camera and Scanner Wizard starts up automatically. (If it doesn’t, open your My Pictures folder. You’ll see that the first link in the task pane is, “Get pictures from camera or scanner.” Clicking launches—you guessed it—the Scanner and Camera Wizard.)

The options you see during the march of the wizard screens are very similar to the ones described in the previous pages. The chief difference is the Choose Scanning Preferences screen, where you’re supposed to indicate what kind of scan you want to make (color, grayscale, or black and white) and what portion of the page you want scanned (by dragging the little square handles on the preview of the page).

To view and manipulate your scanned images, use the commands in the My Pictures task pane. You’d be nuts to order prints of something you’ve just scanned, however. Instead, you’ll probably want to use the software provided by the manufacturer to open and edit your image files. Or, if you haven’t installed such a program, you can just double-click the scanned document’s icon to open it in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (Section 8.1.2.10).

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 book, you’re not capturing ...