As a card-carrying physics teacher for the last 35 years I've
always rejected magic as an appropriate explanation for any
marvelous events or processes I've encountered.  Until now,
that is.  I've just become a scanner, having acquired a
Vitesse Quickie Scanner and Alan Bird's InWords, Westcode
Software's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) package.  
Magic comes unbidden to my mind as the first and best
explanation for the wonders wrought by this symbiotic duo even
though I know all the kudos belong to the Westcode Wizards and
to Vitesse.

Quickie is an Apple-2 series peripheral that gives eyes to
your computer.  Quickie is a convenient handheld gadget that
resembles a very wide mouse.  It will scan pictures, text, or
drawings into your Apple 2GS or Apple //e computer.  The
Quickie scanner communicates with your computer through a
custom board that plugs into any available slot in your Apple
//e or Apple 2GS.  The scanner head is rolled across a
document or picture you wish to capture.

Quickie's scanner head is the same unit that is marketed for
other computer platforms but the outstanding performance
amazing of the Vitesse interface and scan-processing software
is, so far, strictly for Apple 2 users.  Quickie provides its
own yellow-green LED illumination for its sensors as they
process the light that reflects from your document and the
Vitesse software and firmware do the rest.

I've been using my Apple 2GS to capture and manipulate
photographs in ways I couldn't have imagined a few weeks ago. 
I've been scanning printed pages from books and magazines with
Quickie/InWords with results that astound me.

Quickie, by itself, produces images of photographs, line
drawings, schematics, and/or text that can be processed by
your favorite paint program.  These pictures can be viewed on
screen or printed.  Textual material, however clearly
displayed on the screen with Quickie alone, can't be edited
and it can't be imported into a word processor for revision. 
That's where InWords steps in to enhance the situation.

InWords by WestCode Software uses the output from the Quickie
scanner to produce ASCII text from image of printed copy in a
two-step process.  A graphics display of the words is created
first.  (You can read the text onscreen at this stage but the
copy cannot be edited or moved into a word processor just
yet.)  Non-text material in the scan is ignored and InWords
can scan in a column mode that is smart enough to pick up just
a single column ignoring adjacent columns.  Page too wide to
cover in a single pass?   Inwords has a merge mode that will
connect the results of a right and left scan to produce a
single document.  In the next step InWords matches each
character in the picture against a font table.  A recognition
pass creates an ordinary word-processor document that can be
edited within InWords or transferred to the word processor of
your choice.

The bottom line?  Scanned pictures aren't Ansel Adams
exhibition print quality, but they're occasionally suitable
for framing.  Each of my picture scans has been a noticeable
improvement over previous efforts.  One enjoyable use of my
newly-found picture scanning capabilities has been the
exchange of photographs with radio amateur friends around the
country using America Online to transfer the picture files.

Disappointments?  I've had difficulties with InWords when
scanning any text that contains horizontal lines.  A few of my
intended uses for InWords involve text that is interspersed
with horizontal lines, e.g., computer printouts of student
class lists.  Horizontal lines tend to confuse InWords at this
stage of it's development.  All my other initial frustrations
have disappeared as I've improved the patterning of my
scanning technique.  With each InWords session I get new ideas
of ways I'll be able to use my newly-found OCR capabilities.

InWords's next revision, v1.1, will be sent without charge to
every registered owner.  Rumors have it that InWords 1.1 will
include still more magic with automatic font selection as one
of the more tantalizing possibilities.  Perhaps the upgrade
will make my horizontal-line problem manageable.

Mechanical skills are critically important when scanning.  The
way you manipulate the Quickie makes the difference between
success and failure.  I've made steady progress from my
initial occasional disappointments to expected success. 
InWords is surprisingly tolerant of slanted scans from skewed
tracking of the scanner head and a carefully-aligned pass is
clearly the principal secret of a successful scan.  The tricks
I've learned that have helped the most are these:

1)  If the talley light on the scanner head blinks out during
a scan,             you're moving the head too fast 2) Pay
attention to the angle of attack as each line of text is
gobbled          during an InWords scan, making adjustments on
the fly when you see a          scan drifting out of trim.

Scanning and Optical Character Recognition is great fun when
you're using Vitesse's Quickie and WestCode's InWords! 
Scanning, not really magic, of course, is the product of
incredibly-talented programmers.