Producing PDFs (was Re: Scanned (PDF) original descriptions)

[Eric Dunbar]

> 1) Scan hardcopy at 300-400 dpi, and save image file as TIF. Higher
> resolution creates a huge file, and not all OCR (optical character
> recognition) programs can handle higher resolutions.

For the creation of PDFs without OCR I suggest using JPEG, saved at 75%
quality ("very high" in Photoshop) instead of TIFF. The files will be 5-20x
smaller than the TIFF (2-10x smaller than LZW compressed TIFF) and you will
hardly lose image quality.

> 2) Open OCR program - I use a version of Xerox TextBridge that came with a
> cheap flatbed scanner, so it is probably not too good nor current.
> Better/more advanced OCR programs allow you to automatically scan and OCR
> without the need to save the image file. Anyway, I prefer to save the image
> file to clean it up in Photoshop if needed (sometimes the hardcopy is
> stained or there are shadows when scanning from books).

If you have Adobe Acrobat 4 or 5 (3 maybe as well) you can use it instead to
do your OCR for you. It has a module that will convert scans into text and
superimpose the text over the image. Thus, you'll have a searchable version
of a PDF which contains the formatting and graphics of the original.

Eric.