Scanning treasure

[garote]

A while ago La and I purchased a sheet-fed scanner, because we were tired of doing the place-preview-crop-scan-remove-retouch-compress-OCR rigamarole for every page of our old documents pile. So now, we take the staple out of a 10 page essay, drop it upside-down in the scan tray, and hit one button ... and the scanner scans both sides, auto-crops, auto-straightens, auto-rotates, autodetects grayscale images, automatically collates the multiple pages into a PDF, and automatically sends it to OCR software that recognizes and converts almost all the text - whether sideways, upside-down, or hand-written - into searchable data.

One button. Hot damn!

So one of the things I dug out of the boxes was a collection of letters my pal Andy sent from Michigan. When I lived in Davis, at Cafe Purgatory, a letter from Andy was an event, and we would pass it around the household and savor every page.



Nowadays, this sort of stuff would all be done in Powerpoint or Pages and look slick and be half as impressive. Andy did it with scissors, tape, typewriters, and supplies pilfered from his office job.

Comments

[sherrila.livejournal.com]

I still use mine!