preserving / ressurecting old docs?

Hi, On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 Bill Bradford wrote: 100dpi is too low a resolution; it is little above monitor screen resolution, and small text may be illegible. Future OCR-ing of the scans would likely be unsuccessful too. A better alternative is to scan at a reasonably high resolution in monochome (two colours, black and white), say 300dpi or 600dpi. Most viewer software renders the scanned pages on-screen in greyscale anyway, and output when printed on paper is far better. Bilevel images compress losslessly very well, *much* better than greyscale. If there is spot colour in the original, it would in theory be possible to scan at equally high resolution with little impact on file size. (E.g. VAX/VMS manuals have some text in red, so there are essentially three colours; white, black and red.) You would have two images which could be overlaid on each other. If anyone knows of a software package that will work like that, please let me know. Depending on your scanner and the paper thickness, you may find that text from the opposite side of the page "shines through", especially in greyscale images. You can put a sheet of black card or similar on top of the page to be scanned to reduce this effect. -- Mark