Bitmap vs.Vector
Image Formats

Don't let thin paper mar your results. Place a black sheet of paper between the page and the flatbed scanner lid to prevent text printed on the opposite side of the document you are scanning from showing through.

Simple Search results depend on the accuracy of the OCR engine-so scan your documents at 300 dpi instead of 200 dpi. Clean documents will always be more accurately recognized than those with a lot of noise (stray marks, blurriness, etc.).
If your document has background shading, or noise, use the SharpPage option for scanning, or the Clean Page option from the Page menu within PageView. Also, you can only OCR documents that are scanned in 1-bit mode (black and while) to create the SimpleSearch index. Any documents scanned in color or grayscale will not have a text index and cannot be searched (or found) with SimpleSearch.

Your scanner's brightness control impacts the quality of your scan. To find out if yours is set properly, zoom in to examine the page. Broken characters indicate that scanner brightness is too light. Blurred characters indicate that scanner brightness is too dark.

Virtually all scanned images can he improved with a little tweaking. Naturally, the old saying, "Garbage in, garbage out," applies here. I find that most scans can be improved by adjusting the color balance (hue) and brightness/contrast (if you are using Photoshop, you'll find the Levels command produces superior results to the Brightness/Contrast command). Some software programs have an "automatic" setting. Try it first.

In many cases, the biggest improvement to your scanned images comes from a function called Linsharp Masking. But use it judiciously. Too much of this effect can produce an undesirable "halo" effect around objects; just the right amount will sharpen up the edges of images so that your scans look sharper and clearer. Generally, Unsharp Mask should be the last filter you apply to your image. Perform all other image manipulations first.

A common fallacy is that the higher resolution you scan at, the better your color or grayscale image will look when it is printed. Believe it or not, this is false, at least when we are talking about traditional printing processes. When we print a continuous tone scanned image to a laser printer, the printer has to translate the continuous tone image to one that is built from dots. There are a finite number of dots, depending on the printer's resolution, and the term that we use to describe and control this is known as the "lines per inch" setting. As the name implies, this sets the number of lines per inch (dpi) that the printer will use to output your print job. On a low-end laser, this dpi number might be as low as 53; on a $200,000 image setting machine, scanned images are usually output at 133 dpi or thereabout.

Now, here's why this dpi information is important: you only need to scan a color or grayscale image at double the dpi setting you are planning to print it at. In other words, if your 5"x5" original is destined to be printed at 133 dpi, you only need to scan it at 266 dots per inch (dpi), assuming of course that you are scanning an image at 100 percent of its original size. Scanning grayscale or color images at higher resolutions only wastes time and disk space.