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Scanner Guide | Scanner Photocopying >

Open the Xsane program, which you will find in the start/applications menu under "Graphics" or something similar. While the program is loading, please load your item into the scanner bed, note that items should be aligned to the top right corner, as indicated by the arrow.

A number of new windows may appear, you may dismiss the "Histogram" and "Standard Options" windows, for basic use, you will not need them.

You should now have two windows on screen, the main Xsane panel window and a "preview window", which will not show much at this stage.

Main Xsane window

Set the menu option next to the cross-hairs (which reads "Save" in the illustration) to "Viewer"

Now go to the preview window, if your item is a standard size, such as A4, you can set that in the lower-left and side, (the option reads "Full Size" in the illustration, that is the default) and click on "Acquire Preview".

Xsane Preview window

Wait as a low-resolution scan is performed, after a short time your item will appear in the preview window. You can now set the margins by dragging the mouse cursor from the upper left to lower right corners of the area you want scanned (this is especially useful if you have an item such as a photograph that is surrounded by white borders because it didn't fill the whole scanner bed.

Now return to the main dialog, infernally Xsane prefers cryptic icons to plain text labels so some decoding is required.

• The option with the gray and white squares icon should be set to color, gray or line-art depending on what the material is

• The option with the dots of varying sizes is the DPI, you can set it from 75 to six-hundred, 300 is normally adequate for full-sized pages of text and 150 is good for scanning photographs to be emailed. 600 can be used to archive photos, or for similar purposes.
• The option labeled "Type" refers to the type of file that will be produced.
  • For uploading to photo web-sites, or e-mailing photos, select "JPEG"
  • For all other purposes, select "PNG"
  • If you wanted to scan multiple pages, and have them collate into a single PDF file, you can do this but this is not the way, do not select the "PDF" option.
• If your preview came out too dark or too light, you may adjust the sliders, the black and white wheel icon is the contrast, the sun-burst icon is the brightness and the "Γ" icon is the gamma-correction. Gamma-correction is a complex topic, see Wikipedia:Gamma correction for more information.

You may now press scan.

After your scan, the Viewer appears, rotate your image with the rotate icons if needed, then click the disc icon to save.

Categories: Hardware, Scanner, StepByStep