sceye-Workbench (MAC)

Create fully searchable PDF's from your letters and papers in just seconds, comfortably and fast - Perfectly suited for Spotlight.

The Interface

The application fundamentally divides into 3 areas, which each have a special task. 

Preview area (1): Here you will see a live preview when the sceye is connected. Anything that is placed underneath the sceye will be instantly visible.

Page area (2): Every page belonging to one document will be induvidually shown here in an elegant coverflow view and can be subsequently changed.

Profile area (3): The most important folders for managing your document profiles are applied here, which allows fast and simple saving without annoying dialogues.

All settings which are only occasionally required can be found in the menu bar.

Activating licences

The first thing which you should do is activate all licences which are available for your sceye. A small dialogue is opened with a double click on the "licence status" above on the left, in which you can register the licence. If you do not know the licences, you can easily obtain them online. In order to do this the sceye must be connected, so that the serial number can be read. 

1. Lay a document in the scanning area and press the scan button under the preivew picture. Repeat this step if you have several pages which belong to each other. The document appears with the induvidual pages in the converflow view. 

2. With a double click on the profile "Desktop", a PDF document with an automatically selected file name will be stored on your desktop. With a double click on the PDF, you can see the result be shown in the preview.

The preview shows a smaller depiction of how the scanned document will look like. When "automatic cropping" is activated, green corners indicate that good information for automatic straightening and cropping has been found. The more green corners, the better. In addition, an own box can be made with the mouse directly in the live window, to manually select the scan area.

Under the live preview you can set the contrast to your own tastes with the slide control.

A good value is 20% (left = 0% / right = 100%).

Directly underneath this is the scan button, which can also activate the autoscan mode after licence confirmation.

Many documents consist of various pages. These pages are shown in the middle in a coverflow view. You can change between pages directly by clicking or comfortably scroll through the induvidual pages quickly with the cursor buttons.

With the button bar above the coverflow display you can shift the oders of pages, rotate them in 90° steps or delete induvidual pages. In addition you have access to information about every induvidual page and can change the OCR-language for single pages when necessary (when different from the standard language).

A file can also of course be saved explicitly in a folder with the "Save as" function (cmd+S). The freely definable profiles can very easily be edited. In doing so a profile can be easily be selected with a double click, through which the pages of a document in the coverflow view are compiled and edited according to the profile settings.

For every profile, one of the following settings can be set.

• a profile name

• the saving location

• the filename - automatically generated or asked upon saving.

• saving format - as a simple PDF or as a searchable PDFplus with imbedded fulltext. 

• picture quality - JPG compression is chosen here for colour and greyscale pages.

In the profile list, many optional entries can be applied with the plus button. Additionally you can make changes to the settings of a profile at any time through the context menu and delete a profile or if you wish open a target folder directly in the Finder.

Special profiles Mail / Print

These additional profiles allow you to directly send a document as an Email or directly print through a connected printer. The configuration settings can also be changed through the context menu.

Buchmodus

The Book Mode offers the comfortable capturing of books and is only useable in connection with the sceyeX A3 camera. This can be activated by the button above the preview photo. (See Abb. 1)

The basic function of the Book Mode is to seperate both book halves from the middle of the book and to remove thumbs in the border area whilst pressing the book flat. 

Firstly, it must be assured that the A3 document is properly aligned to the camera. (See abb. 2) You then need to adjust the book being scanned by referring to the middle line in the preview screen.  The aim is to make the line congruent with the book seam.

In the next step, you need to set the outer trimming frame. (1) This should be preferably drawn close to the book edge. To change the frame, position the mouse over the line to be shifted. The cursor will change it's appearance and the line can be pulled in the desired direction. The inner frame is then shifted towards the inside (2), so that the line stands close to the text. (See Abb. 3)

To level the curvature of the book, the book is pulled flat and both sides of the book are pressed down with the thumbs. To then capture the scan, you use the self releaser (time scanning), as you also know from photo cameras. (See Abb. 4)

The time lapse until capture of a scan (between one second and 30 minutes) can be selected with the adjuster. After activating the check box, the countdown is automatically started. The remaining time can be viewed under the preview area. Thumbs must be located between the inner and outer frame during a scan, where they will be automatically removed. The self releaser starts again after each scan. The time between the caturing of two scans should be selected, allowing you enough time to turn the page and hold the book flat again. With a little practise it is possible to scan many book pages in a relatively short period of time.

The less frequently required functions are found in the menu bar for reasons of clarity. Scan resolution, colour settings, filter options and much more can be set there. Additionally you can control the light, laser and autocropping from here.

People who scan a lot will prefer to use the keyboard over the mouse. Alongside the diverse settings in the menu which are available through hotkeys, there are 2 keys which significantly make scanning easier:

The spacebar: One press and a scan will instantly be taken.

Return key: the currently selected profile is used for saving.
 

What is what? When saving as a PDF, all pages of a document are compiled into a multipage PDF file, in which the scanned pages are imbedded as images in the PDF. This is done very simply and quickly and can be viewed in every PDF compatible program (like preview).

PDFplus is ultimately an enhanced PDF - the text is enhanced. Every page is analysed with an OCR and the recognised text is imbedded into the file. This is especially beneficial for later searches with Spotlight. Simply type a term which is mentioned in the document and the applicable documents will instantly start to be listed.

Note: PDFplus generally requires more time, as every page needs to be processed through the OCR. This however happens in the background (see the process status bar at the bottom right hand corner), and allows you to directly continue scanning without delay.

All PDF or PDFplus documents are fully compatible PDFs, which of course can be shown in every PDF viewer and be sent as an Email. Mac offers a preview application to open PDFs, change them, add comments and notes to them or simply let you read them in a full page preview.