Scanning documents to PDF

From: Paul Williams <celigne_at_celigne.freeserve.co.uk>
Date: Sat Sep 7 07:57:00 2002

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
Received on Sat Sep 07 2002 - 07:57:00 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:35:38 BST