Help: scanning old computer manuals

From: Jay West <jlwest_at_tseinc.com>
Date: Sun Feb 7 14:09:53 1999

Ok, I've finally gotten around to attempting to scan a lot of the classic
computer documentation that I have. However, I have run into a problem
perhaps some here could shed some light on...

Whenever I scan a page from a manual, the scanned image on the screen looks
horrible. However, when I print it out it is absolutely perfect. Yes, I've
tried zooming in on the image on screen, it is unreadable still. One more
twist is that if I send the image to my OCR software, it turns it into text
with almost perfect accuracy. My scan settings are Line Art at 300dpi.

My scanner is legal size, a scanport 2400 and the application software is
Uload Photoimpact SE. My printer is an HP deskjet 820cse, and the video card
in my system is a Diamond speedstar A50 w/8mb ram. Since the scanned
document looks bad even when still in the scanmodule driver (before getting
passed to the graphics application), I don't think photoimpact has anything
to do with it.

I wanted to put some of the scanned documents up on the web, but since they
look horrible on screen I'm not sure how to proceed. Of course, they can be
downloaded and printed and look great, but... I have downloaded old dec
documentation that looked fine onscreen and printed fine too.

Any suggestions? What am I doing wrong?

Jay West
Received on Sun Feb 07 1999 - 14:09:53 GMT