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Re: Scanning?

Mike Maginnis wrote:

Don't know if this has been addressed before. I'm planning to re-scan
the Computist magazines that I've already done so far, and get moving
on finishing the rest sometime this decade.

Any thoughts on the best way to scan these?  I can't seem to get a
decent image down to less than ~200K.  Anything smaller and it image
incurs serious quality loss.  I suppose in a perfect world, I could
just OCR the issues to a text file; in the real world, that would
require a lot of editing and proofing.  Maybe a searchable PDF file?


A searchable PDF sounds like Nirvana--but experience indicates that
OCR'd documents inevitably have errors that make it through the
proofing process--and the process is much more difficult as well
as errorprone.

Scanning is a fine solution.

You didn't mention what tools you have available for compression.
I find that Photoshop 7's "Save for web.." option is very versatile
and effective.

For text, pre-processing to increase contrast and drop out the
background "white" noise, followed by .gif compression with 4
levels (black, 2 grays, and white) to be excellent.

If you can still see the paper grain in the white background,
then you cannot achieve good compression--noise doesn't compress!

-michael

8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/