Using the Scanner For Handwritten Documents

1. Go to the Macintosh Aral near the window in front of the lab.

2. If the scanner is not already on, please be sure and turn Aral off (shutdown from the special menu) before powering the scanner on. Turning on a SCSI peripheral while a machine is on can cause serious damage.

3. Place your document facedown lined up with the upper right corner of the scanner.

4. Start Adobe Photshop LE from the Apple Items menu to the left of the menu bar.

5. Select Acquire->Silverscan III from the File menu.

6. Change the resolution from its default of 400 dots per inch to 72. (This will save you a lot of time !)

7. Change the scanning mode from Full Color to Gray-16.

8. Press the Acquire button.

9. From the Image menu select Image Size... and change the height to 10 inches while leaving the constrain file size box unchecked.

10. Choose Sharpen->Unsharp Mask... from the Filter menu.

11. From the Mode menu, first change to RGB. Then change to Indexed. By first changing to RGB, you will be offered the option of choosing how many bits per pixel. By now choosing 3, the final image file produced will be about 50 % smaller than it would be with its previous value of 4.

12. Choose Save As from the File menu. Select Compuserve GIF as format. Name the file something.gif. You can temporarily create a folder beneath Development:Users if you need to store the file in the lab.

• Gif format (28K), 8 shades of gray, unsharp mask used.This is much smaller than the other examples here and probably the preferred version.
• A medium quality jpeg (63K) with 16 shades of gray, twice as big.
• Gif format (68K) with 16 shades of gray, also twice as big.
• Unsharp mask filter forgotten
• Using an ordinary pen(83K).

Thanks to Mathlab consultant David Lee for his aid in identifying these procedures !

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Last Update: March 12, 1996