The Computer Club Newsletter

September 2002

By Ron Uncapher

What a great turnout we had for the September Computer Club meeting. George Groom made a presentation on elementary digital photography. I trust all of you who were there learned something from Mr. Groom’s presentation. He had many good points to make for those who are contemplating the purchase of a digital camera. The club’s program committee is planning on following up with more detailed presentations on what to do with your photos after you load them into your computer. Digital photography is a very broad and interesting field, so there will be much material for further education.

The next meeting will fall on Friday, October 1^st. The main feature will be "Home Computer Network Basics". The presenter will be Victor de Groote, our resident expert. There have been many inquiries about networking, so this is your chance to learn all about the subject and to have your questions answered. As always, everyone is welcome.

The writer attended his first computer club conference this past month. The Southeast Regional User Group Conference held the first annual event in Atlanta, GA on Sept. 13, 14, and 15. There were some 68 attendees from as far north as Canada and South to Florida. And would you believe, there were seven attendees from Loudon County as well as four from the Plateau Computer Club in Crossville (Fairfield Glade). Don and Carol Stieghan and Bernie and Barbara Gulowski represented the Loudon County Club along with their club president, Steve Peyrot. Don and Carol are also members of the Tellico Village club. The purpose of the conference was to bring together many and varied computer user clubs to exchange ideas on how to run a club for the greatest benefit to the members and how to deal with the problems that invariably plague these kinds of organizations. Some of the things we learned will be helpful to the growth and prosperity of our club in the future. I will try to have a few words to say about the conference at our next meeting.

Many of you have scanners. Some of you have a scanner, but don’t know what to do with it. One of the many uses for a scanner is to scan printed text such as a magazine page and convert it into a document that you can alter with your word processor. The process is called OCR or Optical Character Recognition. A scanner, by itself, can only make a graphical copy of whatever you put through it. That is, it takes a picture, just as a camera would. Your scanner came with a CD-ROM that included software that enables you to copy and print a document or picture. The software also included a program for enhancing or modifying pictures. These are the most common uses for a scanner. But, the software also included a feature to perform OCR or text recognition. The next time you open your scanner program, look for the OCR option. It may be labeled OCR or TEXT with an icon that looks like a document rather than a picture. It will let you save the text that you scanned into a word processor format (.doc) or a text format (.txt) or a rich text format (.rtf). After you save the document to one of these formats, your word processor or editor can open it. Of course, you can then change the text or keep only parts of it for whatever use you may have. It may be necessary to correct the mistakes the OCR software made. It is not a perfect process.

Here are some things to look for when you intend to perform the OCR process. If your program does not have a text setting, then set the scanner program to scan in black and white, as opposed to color or gray scale. The scanning density should be at least 300 dots per inch (dpi) for best accuracy. The OCR software that came with your scanner is probably a "lite" version, that is, it is not a full-featured program and will have limited capabilities. A full-featured program will be able to scan in any language, include graphics, and reproduce the formatting of your text to a high degree of accuracy. However, the lite version can still be very useful.

Don’t forget the Computer Club meeting on Tues., Oct. 1 and check out the Website at www.TVCUC.org .