Documentation

Richard wrote: It's OK if you have top-quality documentation. But lots of computer docs out there are old, faded, dirty, creased, well-thumbed etc. and unless someone's prepared to visually check every scanned page, there's a chance that the bi-level algorithm in use will corrupt the data and it'll go unnoticed. If using greyscale then such artifacts can be dealt with at a later date (i.e. at OCR time) rather than at scan time. Of course, OCR is by its nature slow as the data has to be messed with at input anyway and checked upon output, so some extra tweaking there isn't so bad - but it's useful if the initial scan process can be as quick as possible (it's time-consuming enough as it is!) I suppose it's one of those situations where you end up throwing away information no matter what (after all, any scan is essentially a digital representation of analogue data), but there's a danger of throwing away too much data - and for rare docs you might only get the chance to scan them once. For rare items I'd rather have maximum quality "just in case", even if it does mean more storage space. cheers Jules