How do I interface an encoder?

Hi All,
Basic question here.. I have just scrapped a large laser printer which to my delight contained a decent stepper mottor and two very decent DC Servo motors, both with quadrature encoders.
In very basic terms can someone point me in the right direction for what I need to enable these two dc servo motoros as x and y axis drives, more from a feedback perspective than a drive perspective.

Is there an interface board I need to supply between the encoders and two inputs on the parallel port?
Within EMC what is required to interpret these inputs?

It may be simpler to use steppers, but these motors are good and free.

If the encoders have TTL level outputs, they can be connected directly to the parallel port pins.
For experimenting I would suggest using a PCI parallel port card instead of a motherboard parallel port,
as a connection mistake will be less costly. I would also suggest powering the encoders from the PCs power
(USB tap is easiest), so you dont drive the parallel port with the encoder outputs when the PC is off.

Note that EMCs maximum count rate for software encoder counting (via the parallel port pins)
will be limited by your motherboards latency