Archiving docs

I use a Fujitsu 600c to scan everything, using software that I wrote just for archiving old manuals. I used the ImageBasic toolkit from Diamond Head Software (purchased by my company for other purposes ;) ) that came packaged complete with all kinds of neat utilities like de-speckle, skew-fix, etc. It's nice to use because I set a few pre-set scanning modes that set up the scanner for what I'm doing; noisy b/w, noisy colour, text-only, detailed-graphics, etc. Some suggestions: 1) Try scanning text or any B/W pages in B/W mode. Since the bits can only be white/black, it can automatically get rid of a lot of background noise. 2) I think the loss of detail on the schematics may be due to the resolution of your scanner, as well as noise showing up because of the greyscale setting. Try them B/W and just adjust the contrast/brightness until you lose the noise. The nice thing about Photoshop is being able to edit sections of the page at a time, so you could clean up each little section as you go. 3) Depending on what kind of printer you have, you might try playing with the half-tone/dithering settings as well. Most of my images of 8.5x11 are 50k-250k for B/W, 500k-1.5M for 16-shade, and anywhere from 5-15 megs for colour (all at 600dpi). I usually print them on an HP Laserjet 4si at 600dpi or an Apple LW16-600 with photo-grade enabled. Aaron On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Doug Coward wrote: > I would like hear from anyone that has done any archiving of their > classic computer documents and manuals. > > I'm currently using a UMAX 300P that claims a maximum 24 bit color > resolution of 300x600 dpi. I'm scanning into Photoshop4 and saving > in JPEG format. I'm trying to save as much information as I can, so > pages that have any color besides black and white, I'm scanning > at 299 (that's the max for color) dpi in RGB and and everything else in > 299 dpi grayscale. I'm averaging, for 8.5 x 11 pages, about 5.3 Mb > for color and 2.1 Mb for grayscale. Just last weekend I burned > my first CD of docs consisting of 26 color pages and 170 B/W > pages for a total of 454 Mb.( I didn't fill the CD bcause I was anxious > to try printing the files at work.) > I printed two of the highest detailed B/W pages (schematics) today > at 400 dpi. The results were disappointing. All of the fine details were > lost. I assume I need to use a higher resolution for printing. I also have > quite a bit of background clutter on the printed page. I'm having no > problems seeing the smallest details when I magnify the pages in > Photoshop. > > > > > > ========================================= > Doug Coward dcoward(a)pressstart.com > Senior Software Engineer > Press Start Inc. > Sunnyvale,CA > > Curator > Museum of Personal Computing Machinery > http://www.best.com/~dcoward/museum > ========================================= >