Epson ActionScanner PC User Setup Information - What You Should Know Before Sc - Page 5

A WORD ABOUT SOFTWARE Your scanner hardware works hand in hand with your software to produce data files. In fact, the most important aspect of getting great results with your scanner is understanding a little bit about the software that creates these files. The rest of this booklet presents software topics that will help you to understand the scanning process. You'll find that scanning software is used to produce two types of files: text files, which contain characters and letters, or image files, which depict some type of illustration. Text files can be edited with an ordinary word processing program. Image files can be manipulated using special software programs called image editors. FROM PAGE TO FILE-OCRs CAPTURE TEXT OCR (optical character recognition) programs decipher hard copy words and covert them into editable text files, just as if you had typed them yourself. More powerful programs even recognize a variety of typestyles and page formats. Why waste time reentering information to get it on disk? For businesses with a steady stream of critical information or any hard copy data that must be converted to disk, a scanner and an OCR program can be real time-savers. You can combine information from many different sources into comprehensive reports, convert old documents to data files for easy storage, capture information from trade journals or papers-the list goes on and on. Even if you usually use your computer for simple word processing or spreadsheets, you'll appreciate the convenience of OCR. To prove it, Epson includes a leading manufacturer's OCR Try-Pak with each of its scanners, so that you can try out