10 Jun
2001
10 Jun
'01
9:25 a.m.
Also, and this is something you probably already know,
but unless
the stuff you're scanning contains images with gradients (i.e.
photographic) you can drop the bitlevel to 2 (true black-and-white)
and up the scanning DPI to 300 or 600 and get very sharp results
with that. They will print like new. If you then print _that_ from
Photoshop to the PDFWriter you'll probably get some good results.
Ok, I hadn't tried really bumping up the DPI on the 1bit
scan, as I figured it would make for a very large file. The initial
scans at the lower resolution were nothing to brag about so I tried
grayscale, which gave good results but a largish file. After the
above suggestion, I did a few test scans and then scanned a whole
newsletter at 600dpi. The end PDF file size was almost identical to
the previous 100dpi grayscale scans but with much better results when
scaling the output for different screen sizes in the viewer. Even
though the end file size is the nearly the same though, the Acrobat
viewer is more a good deal more sluggish when moving around in the
600dpi version.
Re: OCR -- Trouble I've had is (and this is just
pickiness, if the
actual info's all you care about then it's no prob) you invariably
lose the font and other aspects of the original appearance of the
document, which is a bummer. I converted a PDF of Sun Remarketing's
Lisa DIY guide into HTML with images because I wanted search engines
to be able to index the content.
The ability to search the PDF would be nice, but I think the
amount of work required to do the OCR and then do all the formatting
and such would outweigh that benifit, though the OCR'd PDF's tend to
be smaller as well. I'd prefer to keep the original layout, fonts
and all, though.
Jeff
--
Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757