manuals in pdf (resolution, compression)

Tom> I have a lot of manuals I want to scan and am trying to decide Tom> upon the best format. I'd like some opinions on the following Tom> scans of a 128-page Franklin AceWriter manual. Tom> On the low end is a pdf of bitmap images. It's hideous, but Tom> only 3.5 MB. Tom> The high end is a 40 MB pdf of jpeg images. This one's easy on Tom> the eyes, but is an awfully large download and I'm wondering if Tom> it might not print as nicely as the bitmap. Tom> In the middle is a pdf of compressed jpegs at 15 MB. This looks Tom> good to my eyes, I just wonder about using compressed jpegs for Tom> archiving... JPEG is NOT designed to handle bitonal (black and white) source material. It's designed for continuous tone images such as photos. That's where the name comes from and that's what its algorithms are designed for. If you apply it to a bitonal image, several things will happen. 1. The files end up very large. 2. The images end up blurred and full of compression artifacts. The correct way to compress bitonal images is with a compression algorithm designed for that job. TIFF, GIF, and PNG are examples. Not only will you get better quality, but you'll get smaller files. paul