The best program is .... Adobe Acrobat (real, full version Acrobat; not the free "Acrobat Reader". Acrobat is an incredibly rich and powerful tool for doing EVERYTHING related to PDF files. It's far more powerful than most people have any idea. Unfortunately, it's expensive. But it can do what you want, and more. Scanning: Generally, scan at 300 dpi, in Grayscale (256 shades of white-to-black). [Obviously, this is for monochrome documents]. There is no reason to use 600 dpi unless the document is very unusual, it will only make the file 4x larger and, in most cases, no better. JPEG is ok, but keep the compression light. Your file size should be a few hundred thousand bytes (up to approaching a megabyte) per page, although this depends on the document. This works for both text only and documents with [black and white] photos. [you MAY want to use 600 dpi on pages with halftone (dithered dot) photos to get rid of moir?]. Do not use "black and white" (e.g. 1 bit per pixel; every pixel either white or black) even for "black and white" documents. Grayscale always produces a MUCH better result. I know it's counter-intuitive when the document is just black text, but it's true. There are ways to get Acrobat cheaply. The best way is through educational channels. Students at participating institutions can get current version PROFESSIONAL editions ($449 list) [OUCH !!] for anywhere from $55 to $110. Another approach is to buy an OLD, full version copy of Acrobat used on E-Bay so that you qualify for the "upgrade" editions of the latest (or later) versions ($99 to $199 instead of .... $449). Speaking of educational discounts, Students can buy a copy of Windows 7 PROFESSIONAL for $30. I won't go into other student deals (I teach part time at a local school), but the software deals available to students are so good (Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of software (Microsoft, Adobe, Corel, AutoCad, etc. available at like up to 90% off) that it can easily pay to take one course just to become a "qualifying student" and be able to buy this stuff. Barry Watzman Watzman at neo.rr.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:15:30 +0000 From: Philip Pemberton <classiccmp at philpem.me.uk> Subject: Manual scanning: TIFF-to-PDF software with greyscale support? Hi guys, I'm after a program that can convert TIFF files into PDFs. I've seen Eric Smith's "Tumble" app, which works great... but only for B&W TIFFs. While I can use Imagemagick to convert the images to B&W, that defeats the point: there are photos on the scanned pages, and I'd rather like to keep them as photos, not black splodges. Also, has anyone come up with a "best practice guide" for manual scanning? At the moment I'm scanning like this: B&W text only: 600dpi, black and white, threshold=50%. Text + photos: 600dpi, greyscale, then despeckle and scale down to 300dpi. Obviously if there are better ways (in terms of quality and/or speed) I'd like to know before I scan a ton of testgear manuals... Also, does anyone know of an app that can take the PDF file, OCR it and then insert the text as a background layer while leaving the image alone? I'm pretty sure Acrobat can do this, but like most Adobe software, the price tag is somewhat... eye-watering. "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it." Thanks, -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk