Manual scanning: TIFF-to-PDF software with greyscale support?

Philip Pemberton wrote: Hmm, what are you using for the Imagemagick command line? I've thrown TIFFs at it before (at varying levels of bpp) and got sensible PDFs out the back end. It's possible that it's a versioning/library issue, though - doesn't IM make a call into someone elses' PDF library to do the actual assembly? Maybe it's this part that's "broken" on your particular setup. I'd still do those at a few bpp unless the pages were totally free on contaminants, creases etc. - I've seen cases where 1bpp introduces noise into the image which can screw up a later OCR attempt. I'd question the threshold too, unless you've got time to proof-read everything (things like scans from dot-matrix printouts can vary quite a lot in tone I've found, so I think it's better to keep things "as-is" and consider things like threshold tweaks as part of a subsequent "post-process" or OCR phase) I've usually done things at 300 or 400dpi (depending on the content) just to keep the sizes down a bit - but with storage getting ever-cheaper there's perhaps not the incentive to do that now and 600dpi is fine (more is probably overkill unless trying to do things like fiche) I didn't have a sheet-feeder, but a lot of my stuff was comb-bound (and/or I had lots of data spread across manuals with low page counts). I did thousands of pages by hand, and it was somewhat soul-destroying. :/ Not me. I chose to delegate the OCR step to future generations (by which time OCR will hopefully be a little better anyway) :-) I couldn't handle scanning all the above content *and* proof-reading the subsequent OCR (and personally I like physical printouts, so whether it's OCR or images makes no difference to me) cheers Jules