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What kind of printer are you using? I've had difficulty reading scanned barcodes printed on an inkjet printer, but they worked much better when the same scan was printed on a laser printer.
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How "high" is your resolution?
And, are you scanning in black and white or gray scale? I have found, contrary to what you might expect, that gray scale (at, say, 600 or 1200 dpi) actually seems to give better effective resolution than B&W at the same dpi. This is for Canon and HP scanners.
Try scanning in gray scale, and then use contrast enhancement to make it look more like B&W.
Unfortunately, the file sizes are a lot bigger for gray scale!
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Dave and Wayne --
Thank you for your responses. I used an HP LaserJet 6P for printing the scanned barcodes (from documents purchased from MoHPC and "the other site"). I have yet to attempt any scanning, and do not own a scanner.
My main query was whether the failure of the Wand to reliably read the printed-scan barcodes was due to the minor imperfections and irregularities, or to the reflectivity of the printer paper I used.
I do have a complete set of manuals for the Wand, as well as a copy of the HP Journal article about it. There might be some clues in those sources.
When I scan the Solar Engineering users' solutions book, I'd like to obtain crisp rendering of the barcodes with a reasonable file size. I certainly won't scan in color (there isn't much of it in the book), but it would be nice to "make do" with B&W instead of grayshade.
Thanks,
-- KS