Archiving docs

I use a Fujitsu 600c to scan everything, using software that I wrote just for archiving old manuals. I used the ImageBasic toolkit from Diamond Head Software (purchased by my company for other purposes ;) ) that came packaged complete with all kinds of neat utilities like de-speckle, skew-fix, etc. It's nice to use because I set a few pre-set scanning modes that set up the scanner for what I'm doing; noisy b/w, noisy colour, text-only, detailed-graphics, etc. Some suggestions: 1) Try scanning text or any B/W pages in B/W mode. Since the bits can only be white/black, it can automatically get rid of a lot of background noise. 2) I think the loss of detail on the schematics may be due to the resolution of your scanner, as well as noise showing up because of the greyscale setting. Try them B/W and just adjust the contrast/brightness until you lose the noise. The nice thing about Photoshop is being able to edit sections of the page at a time, so you could clean up each little section as you go. 3) Depending on what kind of printer you have, you might try playing with the half-tone/dithering settings as well. Most of my images of 8.5x11 are 50k-250k for B/W, 500k-1.5M for 16-shade, and anywhere from 5-15 megs for colour (all at 600dpi). I usually print them on an HP Laserjet 4si at 600dpi or an Apple LW16-600 with photo-grade enabled. Aaron On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Doug Coward wrote: