Scanning

TWAIN stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name. It is the interface with imaging devices like scanners and digital cameras so they are standardized. The only time you need be concerned with it is if your scanner stops working.

You are probably experiencing problems with your OCR. A page of text you scan is just a photo to the computer. Most scanners come with optical character recognition software (OCR) that will scan the photo and try to extract editable text from it.

HP scanners usually integrate the OCR and automatically convert when you select the output type to “Text”. This will work nearly perfectly with a plain page of text like a letter, but images and especially line graphics will throw older bundled OCR versions for a loop. The gobeldy-**** you are getting is probably from the OCR not being able to translate symbols.

You could buy the newest OmniPage Pro 11 OCR which will integrate with your HP. It is excellent at sorting out what does and does not get translated. http://www.caere.com/products/omnipage/pro/ Unless the price can be justified by using it for business or scanning a lot of text, it is a pricey fix.

Your best bet would probably be to scan the offending pages as grayscale or color and save the file as a JPG, which is compressed and appropriate for e-mail. Then just attach the file to your e-mail. Use about 150 DPI or the file and image will still be large.

Perhaps you don’t have MS Fax set up right: http://www.mcfedries.com/books/cigwin98/faxing.asp

Free fax capable software you might try:

http://www.freewarefiles.com/programs.php?ProgramID=1027&categoryid=5&subcategoryid=65

http://www.v3inc.com/freecc.htm

You don’t have to OCR to send something as e-mail. Scan in B & W at 300 dpi if you have just text and grayscale if there are images. You could even do color at 150 DPI. Start out in PrecisionScan and have it save the file as a jpg or jpeg. Those files are compressed so you have a small file to send. Open your e-mail program like Outlook Express and Insert>File attachment in the outgoing mail message. The person who receives it will get better quality than a fax from a fax machine. A fax is a raster image as well so the text can’t be edited anyway.

Your scanner isn’t the newest and the OCR software not the latest. It is normal to have to make corrections with older OCR. I have no idea why the corrected version isn’t showing up in your fax instead of the uncorrected, but I can assure you it is the way your are saving or transferring the file after you correct it.