Document and mail scanning using ScanBar


Before you begin
In order to use the ScanBar™ you must have a TWAIN driver installed on your computer. All modern document scanners are delivered with a Twain driver on a CD. Follow the vendor’s description for how to install the TWAIN driver if it is not already installed.

Getting started
The easiest way of scanning multi page documents is to use the ScanBar.  We recommend using ScanBar for multi page document scanning. ScanBar will always have the same look and feel, even if you have several different scanners connected to your computer. From ScanBar you may easily configure tasks to be automatically executed after scanning. You will find the scanning performance is better when using ScanBar compared with using the vendor specific TWAIN dialog. Additionally, ScanBar allows for the creation and execution of different scanning profiles.


The ScanBar is located on the right hand side of the PixEdit main window unless you moved it. Click the big green button to start scanning with current scanner settings. Clicking the orange button will display the scanner’s vendor specific dialog box. ScanBar offers adjustment of the most frequently used settings available in the scanner such as page size, resolution, color or black/white scanning, brightness, contrast, et cetera. ScanBar may also configure which tasks shall automatically execute immediately after scanning such as quality enhancements, document separation, saving, OCR with the snap-in module, macro execution, et cetera.

How to select scanner
Clicking on the profile name on the top of ScanBar allows you to select between different Twain scanners and scanner profiles. By default, you may choose between installed scanners, but you may also create your own customized profiles even if you have only one single scanner. This makes it easier to scan different types of material that requires different default settings.

Paper size
This option allows you to select between standard sheets sizes supported by the scanner. Please note the content of this list will vary, depending upon your scanner capabilities. If your scanner is able to deliver black borders around scanned sheets, you may want to let the software automatically select page size, allowing you to put a mixture of different page sizes into the document feeder. To take advantage of this option, remember to enable this option in the After Scanning dialog and set the scanner to maximum paper size.

DPI
Choosing a high resolution enables your scanner to pick up very small details from the document, but creates a larger file size. Choosing a very low resolution, you may not be able to read important small text on the resulting pages.

The most common resolution is 300 DPI for black/white document pages and 150 DPI for color pages. If you enable ACRO in the After Scanning configuration, PixEdit will choose both resolution and color mode automatically. When choosing this option, you should not configure a lower resolution than the value you set for automatically selected black/white pages by ACRO. ACRO will reduce the value depending on whether PixEdit chooses to make color or black/white pages. If your documents contain a random mixture of color and black/white pages, you will save a lot of time letting ACRO also choose DPI in After Scanning automatically.


Color mode
This option lets you choose between the various color capabilities built into your scanner. If you always scan in color mode, you may want to enable ACRO in the After Scan dialog. PixEdit will automatically reduce any pure black/white pages and greyscale pages to their respective best compression format, while leaving the true color pages as color pages. At the same time, ACRO will also adjust to the resolution.

Page mode
This option chooses between append, overwrite, insert before or after current page.

Brightness and Contrast
Use these settings to compensate for very dark or very light documents. In some cases, you will find that acceptable quality can only be obtained by scanning in greyscales or color mode. If your document contains a mixture of good and bad quality pages you may want to enable ACRO in the after scanning configuration box, instead of experimenting with the Brightness and Contrast settings. ACRO will then automatically choose the best color mode for the various pages in your document.


After Scanning (automatic final processing)
The lower part of ScanBar contains controls for configuring which types of operations PixEdit shall execute automatically after scanning. Independent of scanner type and brand, PixEdit offers automatic document separation using barcodes, quality enhancements, page size detection, automatic orientation, automatic deskew and blank page removal, automatic color and resolution optimization (ACRO), OCR using the OCR snap-in module so your saved PDF’s becomes searchable, automatic saving to any supported file format using barcodes, incrementing file names or time/date, execution of custom made macros and much more.

Although you will find a lot of useful functions for after-scan processing, your business may have very special requirements that do not exist in the After Scanning dialog. As an example, let’s say you want to always join three and three pages automatically after scanning (this is a quite uncommon occurrence, so this serves as a good example in this case). You can do this with the help of a macro. Simply open a document, click the macro record button and join three and three pages and specify “All pages” in the join dialog. Stop recording and give your newly recorded macro a name, for example, “My special joining”. Now click the Configure button in the After Scanning section of ScanBar, and under the General tab, select your recorded macro from the drop-down list. Three and three pages will now always be joined after completed scanning. Remember to check the Enable option in ScanBar to enable after-scan processing.

You may create many different after-scan profiles, and then load them depending on your various scanning tasks during a production day. Select the profile to be used in the drop-down list in ScanBar. You can create and manage profiles in the Profile tab in the After Scanning dialog.