10.0

ABBYY FineReader 10 Home Edition User’s Guide
13
Tips
This chapter provides additional advice on scanning documents and taking pictures of documents for subsequent
OCR.
Chapter contents:
• Scanning Tips
• Taking Photos of Documents
Scanning Tips
You can set the scanning options in the ABBYY FineReader Scanning dialog box or in the scanner driver dialog box.
See the "Scanner Interface" section for more information about the dialog box.
• Make sure that your scanner is connected properly and switched on.
Consult your scanner documentation to ensure it is set up correctly. Be sure to install the software provided
with your scanner. Some scanner models must be switched on before you power up the computer.
• Place your documents face down on the scanner, making sure they are properly adjusted. Skewed images
may be converted incorrectly.
• Printed documents are best scanned in grayscale at 300 dpi.
Conversion quality depends on the quality of the original document and scanning parameters. Poor image
quality may have an adverse effect on the quality of conversion. Be sure to select the scanning parameters
appropriate for your document.
More information about some of the scanning options is available in these sections:
• Selecting the Right Resolution
• Tuning Brightness
Selecting the Right Resolution
The quality of conversion is affected by scanning resolution. Poor quality scans may produce inferior results.
Recommended scanning resolution is 300 dpi.
Important! ABBYY FineReader 10 Home Edition shows best OCR performance when vertical and horizontal
resolutions are the same.
Very high resolution settings (over 600 dpi) result in greater recognition and conversion times without any noticeable
increase in recognition quality. Very low resolution settings (below 150 dpi) may adversely affect the quality of
recognition and conversion.
Font size and resolution:
• 300 dpi for typical texts printed in fonts of size 10 pt or larger
• 400–600 dpi for texts printed in smaller fonts of 9 pt or smaller
Tuning Brightness
Scanned images must be legible. Wrong brightness settings may adversely affect the quality of recognition and
conversion.
In most cases the medium brightness value of 50% will be suitable.
If the resulting image contains too many letters that are "torn apart" or "stuck together," troubleshoot using the table
below.
If your image looks like this Do the following
This is a good quality image.
characters are "torn apart" or very light
• Lower the brightness to make the image darker.
• Scan in grayscale. Brightness will be tuned automatically.