Digitising Documents

Digitisation is turning a paper or board document into a digital file so it can be shared with others. For example, a handwritten recipe from a food technology lesson could be photographed and emailed home instead of the paper being lost.

Scanners and digital cameras mainly digitise existing documents; they do not create a new document from scratch.

Scanners

A flat-bed scanner has a glass surface where you lay the page flat. Some scanners are built into another device, so you may already have one. A sheet feeder pulls through and scans many pages automatically, saving time. A scanner lights the page evenly, so you avoid shadows or poor lighting, and it can capture images and photographs at high resolution.

Digital cameras

A digital camera is a quick way to digitise a document. A professional camera gives more control over image quality, aperture and focus, while a camera already to hand may be good enough for a simple note. A camera beats a scanner when the item is very large, three-dimensional, textured or cannot be scanned easily. For example, a scale model of a stage set can be photographed from several angles so the director can see each scene from the audience; a flat scan could not show that.

Graphics tablets and sharing

A graphics tablet is a flat pad used with a stylus. Whatever you draw on the pad appears on screen, so a game character can be created and saved as a digital file straight away. You can also place a pencil sketch on the tablet and draw over its lines with the stylus, turning the paper drawing into a digital file. Scripts are rarely handwritten, so a script is unlikely to need digitising; it is normally typed and saved digitally from the start.

Digital documents are generally easier to share than physical ones. A physical document can still be digitised with a scanner, digital camera or graphics tablet before it is shared.