General computer skills/Scanning printed pages

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You can save yourself a lot of time
You can save yourself a lot of time
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by ''never'' scanning a page that you've printed. There's a much faster
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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
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