7 Sep
2002
7 Sep
'02
12:57 a.m.
Tony Eros wrote:
Does someone know of a low-cost solution for scanning documents to
PDF format? I'd like to start scanning some docs with my handy
sheet-fed flatbed scanner (HP G85), but what's the best way to get a
stack of pages into a single document?
My current route, which is due to David Gesswein (http://pdp8.net/)
1. Scan at 600dpi B/W and save to individual TIFF files.
2. Clean up scans (crop, removing blotches, etc.) This is the
time-consuming bit!
3. Combine the TIFFs and convert to Group 4 compression at the same time
with tiffcp command from the tools provided with libtiff
(http://www.libtiff.org). Binaries are available for Windows as well.
4. PDF supports this format natively, so you just have to run some
wrapper software, c42pdf. The website for this is
http://c42pdf.ffii.org, but I got my copy from David Gesswein, because I
think he has made some mods to it. This program is so fast that David
uses it in a CGI script to allow page ranges to be selected from the
TIFF file and served up as PDF on the fly.
Libtiff and c42pdf are free. I can't imagine why you'd want to go
through PS to get to PDF!
- Paul