OCR with Microsoft Document Imaging (MDI)

Many of us don’t realize that we have this feature in our computer, that we can do OCR (Optical Character Recognizing), i.e. transfer our print out paper to Word document using Scanner. We don’t need to buy an expensive software and burden our computer.

MDI is a feature in Microsoft Office. The limitation is it works only with three formats: .tif, .tiff and .mdi. If you use scanner to capture your document, you will not have any problem. But if you want to do OCR from documents/files in your disk, you have to convert it to .tif. You can do that easily with other image conversion software, such as Irfan View (free) or Adobe Photoshop (expensive) and many others.

Many gets confuse while using MDI because by default, the document opened in MS Word as .htm;

Follow thess steps and you would find how easy it is:

• Run the MDI through “Start” à All Programs à Microsoft Office à Microsoft Office Tools

• Get the document through menu “File”. You can open an existing document or scan one.

• Click “Scan” to start scanning, and follow the instruction
• While the document is scanned already, click icon of “Send Text to Word”.
  

• MS Word will be opened with the document on it, but unfortunately by default, it come as .htm file.

• To get it as Word document, do “Save as” Word document.
• And to have a “familiar” view, go to menu “View” and click “Print Layout”.
• Now you would get the familiar view of a Word document. You might have to do some editing to get the document as you want.

MDI has also feature of multi language. Click “Tools” –> “Option”, then tab “OCR”. You can select your choice of language.

Firefox blocked by add-ons

One of our visitor came to me with her laptop. This is the symptom, the firefox need very loongggggg time to be launched in fact, Internet Explorer worked very well. Firewall or Antivirus compatibility problem is more common in Internet Explorer than Firefox, so I thought there was a spyware.

But I saw her laptop was full with applications and the firefox full with plug-ins. One of them might block the Firefox. I run Firefox in safemode.

Click “Start” in the bottom left of the monitor –> All Programs –> Mozilla Firefox –> Mozilla Firefox (safe Mode). You can also run the Firefox in Safe Mode through “Start” –>”Run” -> type  “firefox -safe-mode” A dialog box appeard :

I clicked “continue in Safe Mode”. In safe mode, Firefox run smoothly, made me sure that one or more plug-ins might be the problem. I went to menu “Tools” -> “Option” –> “Manage Add-ons”. A list of add-ons came out.

I did trial and error to find the culprit. First, disable all, then run Firefox (normal mode), it went through well. Second step, unable one add-ons, run again Firefox. If it went well, I continued with the next add-ons.

Finally, I found out that the Firecastfox was the culprit. I uninstall it, then the Firefox run normal again. I didn’t reinstall that add-ons, since the owner didn’t need it. She might have installed it unintentionally.

Scanning “separated documents” with Develop Ineo 253

Develop Ineo Printer/Copier Machine has so many feature, but the manual book is not practical (and updated) enough and I could not find a forum in the internet where we can share one each other with other user. Since it is a “big” machine, maybe the users are not so many. To help that few those might need some more practical manual, I will try to post some common procedures. This time I would explain how to scan using this sophisticated machine.

develop ineo 253

This is the machine I use, Develop Ineo+253; It is connected to the LAN. Since I am in Italy, the control panel use Italian language.

The machine has what we call “Control Panel” with touch screen.

To use the Scan feature, first press button “Scan/Fax”.

Touch button “Imm. Diretta”, you will have to choose the destination of the final file. Touch “Casella” for putting it in one of boxes in the printer machine.

Touch button “Casella” and get the boxes those are in the machine, touch one of them.

Touch “Nome Doc” and then type the document name. Touch “OK”

There are two setting variable those you can set. First is the “Impostazione Scanzione”.

This variable will give you choices of settings. For this time, I will only highlight the “Scans separate”.

Choose this by touching it if your original documents are in separate ones, means :
• you use manual scanning one by one, or/ and
• you use automatic one but in more than one group.
With this choice, the final file will only be saved/ compiled as one file after you touch button “Fine”. By touching the “Fine”, one scanning process is terminated.

Push button “Start” to conclude the touch screen panel. You can find the file in the box you have set – all pages in only one file.

That’s all for this time. Next time I will post the steps of  “scanning a book”

Better not to post as Microsoft Office 2007’s files

If you want to offer files for being downloaded in your website, better not using Office 2007 format. In downloading process, Internet Explorer (version 6 as well as 7) will download it as .zip;

For advance user, it is not a problem. The extension name of the downloaded file can be easily changed by this step :

• If you put your mouse in the “download link”, you can see what is the file extension you would download. It is in the bottom bar of your browser’s window.
• Make extension name unhide: Open Windows Explorer –> tools –> Folder Option -> tap “view” –> uncheck “Hide extension for known file type”
• Change manually the file extension from .zip to .docx or .pptx or whatever the correct one, as you have seen from “download link”
• That’s all.

This problem doesn’t occur in other browser such as Firefox and Safari. Is that not funny? There is a good post about this bug, here.

Wrong icon file in CD/DVD drive

This is the syndrome, when you explore the CD/DVD drive, all the files have an “internet explorer’s icon” whatever the file types are.

I was tempted to check the registry and try to reset the icon registry using TweakUI. But fortunately I found the simple solution in one post from techguy.org.

So, the solution is :

• Right click on desktop -> Properties
• Tab “Appearence” -> click button “Effect”
• uncheck the “use large icon”, then click OK

The side effect, your icon in the desktop will be the small types. If you want to change it bigger, you have to set the registry. Yes, I wonder Microsoft often makes “trouble”.