Technique for scanning in documentation

From: Kevin Handy <kth_at_srv.net>
Date: Wed Jan 15 09:53:01 2003

Antonio Carlini wrote:

>>Some scanner software can output PDF directly. That's
>>probably the easiest approach.
>>
>>
>
>The Lexmark W810 and C710 I used to use did that, but it
>was not G4 compressed (not a big deal, but something to
>be aware of).
>
>
>>If you have the full Acrobat package (not just the free
>>Acrobat Reader), it can import common image formats such as
>>TIFF and JPEG, but you have to do it one at a time. There
>>
>>
>
>Acrobat 4 can import up to 50 files at once. So if you have
>scanned to 50 individual TIFFs you can import them all in
>one go (it's not that speedy though!). I expect that
>Acrobat 5 can also import, but I could never find the
>right menu ! What it can do (which 4 and earlier could not)
>is spit out a PDF file as individual G4 compressed TIFFs.
>
>Antonio
>
>
If you don't have acrobat, but have a current RedHat Linux setup:

If you start out with tiff images, you can use the following sequence
to end up with a pdf (as long as you don't get any fatal errors), assuming
that the original tiff files are named something like 't1-001.tif' ...
't1-999.tif'
and the final file will be named 't1.pdf'

    tiffcp t1-*.tif t1.tif
    tiff2ps -a t1.tif > t1.ps
    ps2pdf t1.ps t1.pdf
    rm t1.tif
    rm t1.ps

tiffcp is used to merge all the tif files into a single tif file.
tiff2ps converts the tif file into a postscript one (very big file)
ps2pdf converts the postscript file into a pdf one (smaller than
the postscript)
and rm killes the intermediate files.

There are some 'tif' formats that the programs will not handle,
but it will give you a nasty error message if you try one of those.
Received on Wed Jan 15 2003 - 09:53:01 GMT