Jobs are a central concept in ELAN Capture. All image processing revolves around jobs. Therefore you should understand what jobs are and how they work.

Definition

A job file always reflects the current state of your scanning. First you will have an empty job, that is, there will be no scanned images. Then you will add your images to the Image Selection List. This list contains all the images that you want to process. Next, you set up the processing parameters. They are all part of the job file.

ELAN Capture uses a job file to save everything about scanning a certain set of documents:

The chapter on Processing Jobs, gives you a good understanding of the operation of the image processor. For the time being, you only need to understand that there are several parameters, settings, and a list of images that are part of your job.

ELAN Capture will automatically take care of the job handling for you. You must save the current job before you exit. This way you ensure that ELAN Capture will continue the job where you exited.

All images within a job will use the same processing parameters. In this version of ELAN Capture, you cannot assign different processing options to the different images in the same job. However, you can filter odd and even images so that they will be processed using slightly different parameters. But the set of the processing parameters always apply to the whole job, to all of the images in your job. If some of your images needs special handling, you must place them in a different job.

Job Files Overview

Job files have an extension of .org. A job file only contains the current state of the job. When you load a job, you load the JOB file.

However, The job files are rarely alone in your job folder. Along with your job files you will also find .log files. Log files are much easier to read than job files. Log files are automatically generated when you process images. They are like log books -- they contain a log entry for every single operation. ELAN Capture saves the date and time of the processing, the parameters, the image file name, and other data, from which other programs can extract a great deal of information and report on usage statistics.

The LOG files contain almost everything about the life cycle of your job, including all the previous states of the job. Each state is time-stamped, so the date and time information can easily be extracted from the LOG file. LOG files are not for editing by the user. You can read LOG files if you want to read information in them, but it's not a good idea to edit the LOG files.

Job and log files should be kept together. If you copy or move a job file, you should copy or move the log file as well. Though a job file contains all the necessary information alone, we do not recommend that you delete the log files. If you delete the log file, you will not be able to extract statistical data about your job, and you will not be able to check the previous states of your job.