Guest, Q

The small distortion you get from not having the book flat on the glass is often not a problem if you just want a "picture," but it really messes up the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) performance.

You didn't say whether you use Windows, but I'll assume that's the case. If you hold down the Alt key while you press "Print Scrn" the active window that's on your screen will be copied to the Clipboard. Go to your "picture program," or even something like word and "Conrol-V" or "Edit - Paste" and the picture will be there.

(In some photo programs, you may need a "File - New from Clipboard" rather than just a paste.)

If you just hit the "Print Screen" key, without the Alt, you'll copy the whole screen - which you can then paste.

Either way, you may want to do a little "cropping," but most programs make that fairly easy.

For those sites that block downloading of things, you can sometimes find a link that "points to" the web page you want, right click on the link, and select "save target as" and get stuff that you can't save when you're actually "at" the page. It seems that if the "don't copy gizmo" is on the page you're not supposed to copy from, sometimes this backdoor method will get past it. Be aware that - if it works - you're doing something that the owner doesn't want you to do, which is somewhat impolite. In those rare occasions when I really need to do it, I always make a point of feeling a little guilty about it.

Another "trick" anti-copy method is to post pictures as tiled separate images, so that when you "save picture" you only get the "tile" that you clicked in. Several of the art museums use this method. If you're really determined you can save each tile as a separate file and fit them back together in any decent photo software, but it's very tedious and the results are seldom really satisfactory.

Giok - you should be able to connect almost any scanner to XP, unless it's so ancient it uses an unsupported antique port configuration. Look in Hardware Manager in the Control Panel, and see if it's there. You may need to get an XP-compatible driver, but you should be able to download one that will work - even if you have to get it for a "similar to" scanner from another builder. The scanner is just a couple of lightbulbs on a motorcycle - it's the software that does the work.

John