Scanning old manuals

From: jim_at_ezol.com <(jim_at_ezol.com)>
Date: Tue Mar 9 13:39:52 1999

>> Leaving them as a scanned image is the easy way out, but isn't always
>> practical. Some pages I have have very small print, and the resolution
>> of the image required to make this text readable makes for huge files.
>
>For pages that consist solely of text and line art, scan them as 300 DPI
>TIFF Class F Group 4. That takes only 40-120K per page. I put the
>resulting images into a PDF file, since most people don't have any other
>G4-capable reader, and G4 is supported as a native PDF image format.

This is what I have been doing.... I gave up on JPG and GIF even though
they are directly supported by the major browsers because the image
quality wasn't there and file sizes were getting out of hand when attempts
were made to preserve image quality.

TIFF on the other hand, works well, and is quite compressable. Pretty
much consigns you to putting them in a PDF though, which isn't all that
evil I suppose.

The one attractive thing we loose by creating 60meg PDF files is the
ability to browse pages without downloading the entire thing....

Or am I missing something in Acrobat that will pull pages on demand
from a table of contents?

>Some people always flame me about disliking PDF because they can't run
>Acrobat Reader on their Commdore 64, but realisticly I've found that more
>people have access to Acrobat Reader than any other viewer. My attitude
>is that if I spend the time to scan the docs and make them available
>free on my web site, people that don't like it can take a hike.

I have no real problem with PDF. I am just trying to reduce my labor
investment, and produce quality end results.

>I've written a program using PDFlib to automate creating the PDF from a
>directory full of G4 files.

This sounds rather useful... :-)

>For greyscale and color images, I'm working on a process to separate out
>the images, use G4 coding on the monochrome portion of the page, and
>overlay the images in JPEG format. This will also work nicely with
>Acrobat reader, since it can support overlaid images, whereas most other
>viewer software can't.

This will help a lot too....

>Some results of my scanning can be seen at www.36bit.org. Note that
>most of those scans were done *before* I got a sheet feeder. In my
>experience, although there is some skew with the feeder, there is less
>skew than when I do the pages manually, and the skew is more consistent
>from page to page. If I get really motivated I'll write some deskewing
>software.

What scanner are you using? Your scans look pretty good. Did you do
that 500+ page manual by hand or with the sheet feeder? :-)

Right now I have a stock HP Scanjet 4C, but am considering investing
in a ledger-size scanner with a decent sheet feeder so I can archive
not only my manuals, but my printsets as well.

>Eric

Jim
Received on Tue Mar 09 1999 - 13:39:52 GMT

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