Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let me show you how to use your Mac Book as a scanner.
Today's episode is really about how to be creative when using Apps to get them to do
things they were not really meant to do.
Like for instance suppose you have your Mac Book and you are at a library.
You find some pages of a book or document that you want to copy so you can refer to
them later while doing research.
Well normally you might head over to the old xerox machine and xerox a couple pages and
then add those to your notes.
But if you have a Mac Book with you, you have a camera in it.
So why not take a picture of those pages with your Mac Book's camera and then save them
out as a PDF document.
In order to do this you either need to use an app specialized for this or use just the
things on your Mac but in a creative way.
So here I am on my Mac Book and I want to use the camera to take pictures of pages a
book.
So first I am going to launch Photo Booth which is the preinstalled app that allows
you to use the camera.
Now you can see what the camera sees.
I'm going to take a book here, I'll use my book as an example, and I'm going to put this
in front of it and I can click here and it will give me a countdown.
But a quicker way to do it would be to do Command and Option and T which takes an instant
photo.
Some I'm going to do that.
Command/Option/T takes a photo of it and now you can see it appear there and I can flip
to the next page, take a photo of that.
Notice that the image is mirrored because it is taking pictures of you not of pages
in the book but we will take care of that.
Great.
Now I have three pictures here of the three different pages of the book.
Now if you were doing this for real you would probably take more care to hold the book nice
and steady and get a good clean shot.
But I am just doing this quickly as a demonstration.
So the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to select the images here.
I can hold the shift key down and select all three of them.
Then I'm going to do Edit/Copy or Command C which copies all three images to the buffer.
I'm going to move to another app.
I'm going to move to Preview.
Preview will then allow me to go File/New from Clipboard and actually create three documents
at once.
So you can see the Clipboard was actually holding all three documents and now I have
three documents total.
If you don't see the Thumbnails there make sure you turn on Thumbnails.
You can see one, two, three.
Now let's get rid of this mirroring here.
You can see if I zoom in it is mirrored.
I can easily fix that by just going to Tools/Flip Horizontal and now you can see it's the right
way.
So let's do that for each of these pages or I can actually select multiple ones here and
flip them horizontal.
So now I have them the right way for each one here.
So the next thing I want to do is select all of these Command A for all or just click and
use the shift key and since these are separate documents I want them to be one PDF document.
So I'm actually going to Print and I have them all selected so I'm going to do three
pages here and I can decided whether I want to auto rotate or not.
Let's have it auto rotate so it will do it the long way there.
I can save it as a PDF here in the Print dialogue but I could also just go Open PDF in Preview
to just open this as a second document here in Preview.
So now I can see what I have scanned in with my camera.
It is a little blurry.
I take a lot more care to get some good lighting and a good shot with the Mac Book's camera
so I get a clearer image there.
This is a good example of using functionality in various apps and combining them to accomplish
something like using your Mac Book as a scanner.
So using Photo Booth you were able to take the pictures.
Then using Copy and Paste functionality you were able to get it over to Preview.
Then using Print PDF functionality you were able to combine them all together into a document.
Now of course if you have an iOS device like an iPhone or an iPad you can do this using
an App and create a document from some photos.
So there are lot of different ways to do this.
But this is one way to do it if all you have is a Mac Book.
Hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with
MacMost Now.