Selecting the Scan Method
BubbleScan OMR supports two scan methods:
1.Direct. If your scanner is locally-attached to the PC you can usually directly interface with it using the TWAIN protocol. TWAIN is an industry standard that is supported by virtually all scanners. This is the what most of our customers do.
2.Indirect. If your scanner is network-attached, attached to another computer or there are compatibility issues with our software and the scanner, you can scan the images into a folder and point the BubbleScan OMR software to monitor that folder. As soon as our software detects a new image it will process it. This process works beautifully and is generally used by customer with a departmental copier with scanning feature.
The setup of the BubbleScan OMR software is actually the same and is covered in the next chapter (Scanning into Excel).
Scanner Settings
With either of these options you will at some point be interfacing directly with the scanning software provided by the scanner manufacturer.
Here are the settings you MUST select:
·Black & White
·200 dpi
·Page Size: Letter(the actual size of the physical paper) or Auto
·Double-sided (aka duplex) scanning if you have printed on both sides of the paper, otherwise Single-sided (aka simplex)
Settings you MAY need to adjust or may want to select:
·Brightness or threshold. This varies from scanner to scanner. Start with the default, scan a few marked forms and then decide if you need to increase the brightness to make light marks more visible. Note that this will also make poor erasures more likely to be seen as marks. You will have to be the judge of this.
·If you have a deskew option, it's usually a good idea to select this.
Settings you DO NOT want to select:
·Avoid a setting to detect punch holes.