for "Why should we pay you, when we get what you do for free?" - John Toole (CHM) It doesn't appear i'll be doing this "professionally" any time soon. -- To answer your question, I scan low contrast color text on a high resolution color scanner and try to maximize contrast before doing the thresholding to black and white. Graphic Converter on the Mac has a number of built-in filters that make it very easy to interactively do this. Once I have the values, I can batch convert the scans using the scripting in GC. There is probably something in the Linux or Windows world that is equivalent, though the tools I've tried there aren't nearly as easy to use as GC. The covers on the Oregon State timsharing system memos on bitsavers was a document that I had to fiddle with to get an acceptable scan. They are brown on dark orange paper, which came out totally black on the IS520 B&W scanner (which uses a green scanning lamp).