Scroll through the steps with the left/right arrows on your keyboard or on the screen.
1. Access the ScanSnap settings. Note: If you don't need OCR, i.e. an image of the document is fine for your needs, you can skip to Step 3.
Click the Windows Start menu and find ScanSnap Manager.
These settings need to be set in order to use OCR correctly. You will only have to set them once and they will stay the same for the next time you login.
2. Change the OCR settings.
Be sure to check the settings as seen in the image below.
3. When you have positioned your book, press the Scan button on the machine.
Be sure the middle of the book is lined up with the middle of the scanner.
For better results make the book as flat as possible. You may need to hold down the pages either with your fingers or with some weights on either side. A cell phone and a stapler can be sufficient. Make sure the objects don't cover the words.
4. Scan as many pages as you like and then finish.
Pressing the button will scan your first page. If you wish to scan another, turn to the desired page and click "continue scanning" on the computer (not on the scanner this time). When you have finished all your pages, "finish scanning". You can see the result below (notice my wallet and phone used as weights).
5. Flatten and correct the book curve if necessary.
If you are scanning from a book, you may notice a curve in the resulting scanned page. Choose the second option to correct this.
6. Adjust the scan area that you wish to crop and choose the result as 1 or 2 pages.
Drag the red lines so they contain exactly the page. The options at the top let you keep the 2 scanned pages as 1 or you can divide them into 2 separate pages (preferable). Remember to apply the changes before "save and exit".
7. Apply the changes to all the pages.
Most likely you will want to apply corrections to all of the pages.
8. Choose where to save the document.
There are various save options. "Scan to Folder" is essentially the familiar "save as" option. At the time of writing this guide, I could not get the scan to e-mail option to work.
The result is a "searchable" PDF file. Searchable means that the computer actually recognizes that there is text. It is possible to search for words and phrases, select text, copy and paste.
This is opposed to just a simple scan which often produces and image or "image" PDF. The computer doesn't recognize any text, only pixels (little dots).
As you can see, the text in the image below has been selected. The next slide will show a more detailed result of what we are dealing with.
The text from the scanned "searchable PDF" has been copied and pasted into Word. As we can see, the results are mediocre.
It does a decent job of recognizing most of the words but does make several mistakes. We can also see that it has a hard time understanding sentences, paragraphs and lines.
