How to Scan Text Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with OmniPage Direct Software on the Apple (Black and White) OneScanner

1. Make sure that the Apple OneScanner is on. The power switch is on the left side of the scanner, towards the back.

2. Place your document onto the scanner with the text you wish to scan face-down on the glass. For best results, place the upper left corner of the document in the corner of the glass marked with a red arrow.

3. The OmniPage Direct software that runs with the Apple OneScanner is a simple utility that scans a page of text and then places the scanned text into the last application that was opened. Therefore, you should open Microsoft Word if you plan to save your scanned text into a Microsoft Word file. If you plan to use another package such as Claris Works, make sure to open that application before moving onto the next step. If you also have application open that would go haywire if a bunch of text were to be pasted in, you may want to quit from that application until your text scanning is finished.

4. Select the "OmniPage Direct" command from the Applications section of the menu that drops down under the Apple in the upper left corner of the display.

5. The simplest way to get text from a page into a file on your PC is to click on the Scan button. The OmniPage Direct software will scan the page on the scanner bed and then evaluate different zones of the page to determine what characters are present in those zones. This all happens automatically; as the zones are scanned, a small window appears that shows the individual character images being evaluated. OmniPage will make a best guess as to what each character is and then paste the scanned text directly into whatever application you had open prior to moving to OmniPage.

   If you want more control over the process, click on the Options button prior to clicking Scan. One of the options is "Save text to file," which will place the scanned text into a text file instead of directly pasting it into an application.

6. The software is somewhat tolerant of deviations in how individual letters are supposed to look. However, it is not foolproof. For example, a smudged "a" may not be recognized or a sample of handwriting may feature a number of different characters that are not recognized. OmniPage will identify what it thinks are questionable character interpretations or misspelled words. Unknown letters will be represented by the tilde (~) character.

   A good piece of advice is to spell check the pasted text using the spell checking function of a word processing package such a Microsoft Word prior to scanning additional pages. If you need to scan many pages of a document, it is better to check over the scanned text while you have a hard copy on front of you for comparison. A spell check will turn up most of the words where OmniPage identified the wrong letter or placed a tilde instead of a letter.

7. Once the text has been pasted into the recipient application and you have corrected the scanned text, you can remove the current document from the scanner bed and scan another page. This is done by using the Finder to switch back to the OmniPage Direct utility (Position the mouse pointer in the upper right corner of the screen and hold down the mouse button until the Finder menu appears with all of your PC's open applications. Move down until "OmniPage Direct" is highlighted and release the mouse button.). Once OnmiPage is the active application again, select the "Scan Text" command under the Direct menu.