General computer skills/Scanning printed pages
From PCSAR
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You can save yourself a lot of time | You can save yourself a lot of time | ||
| - | by | + | by not scanning a page that you've printed. There's a much faster |
and higher quality way of doing the same thing. | and higher quality way of doing the same thing. | ||
Current revision
You can save yourself a lot of time by not scanning a page that you've printed. There's a much faster and higher quality way of doing the same thing.
When you scan a page what you're wanting to end up with is a PDF of that page. Your computer can create the PDF without printing it to paper first.
Most programs (e.g. your wordprocessor) have a menu option to create a PDF. This is usually something like "File > Export ..." and then choose "as PDF". This will create a PDF file on your computer which you can then upload to the wiki. You skip the printing and scanning entirely.
For those programs that don't have a PDF option, you can generally choose "File > Print ..." and then set your printer to "Print to PDF".
Avoiding the scanning step will have these advantages:
- it's faster
- it saves paper
- the PDF is more readable
- you can copy text from the PDF
- the PDF is thousands of times smaller
The only times you should want to scan a page that originally came from a computer are:
- when you don't have the original computer file. E.g. someone gave you only the printed copy. Perhaps you can ask them if a PDF is available
- when there's stuff on the printed page that's not on the computer file. E.g. a signature
