Archiving old magazines - scantips.com

1 LINE ART AND OCR109 Archiving old magazinesPeople want to scan and archive old documents,like magazines . Unless you can use line art mode,this job is a really difficult problem, because havingboth text and pictures on the same page causesconflicting goals. We want high quality crisp text. Text to beprinted is scanned best in line art mode at 300 the text prints great, but the pictures are awful. We want good image quality. Pictures need tobe scanned in color mode at perhaps 150 dpi (forthis type of purpose).

2 Moir problems have a solu-tion, see descreen for magazines , Chapter 12. If we scan full page documents in color modefor the pictures, the text is not very crisp, and thefile size is huge. One page can be several mega-bytes, and the file size becomes unacceptable. Color mode is not best for text, and JPG com-pression is even worse for text. JPG compressioncauses artifacts around the text (dark smudgesaround the characters), and it can be pretty bad. Don t forget that copyright is a big issue.

3 Wedo not own rights to distribute this material. Itonly came with rights allowing our personal can we do? This is a really tough problem,don t expect any miracles. We have both text andpictures on the same one page, a conflict in pur-pose. Any scan mode is a major must carefully first define your goal and pur-pose. Do you need to retain the pictures, in color?Or just the text, allowing line art mode? Will youwant to print these pages? Printing requires higherresolution, and a full page will be a huge file.

4 If youonly want to view the pages on the computerscreen, 100 dpi possibly may be large enough, and amuch smaller file, but 100 dpi wont print your goal can scan in line art mode for only thetext (ignoring any pictures, which will go bad), thefile size can be manageable, under 200 KB perpage at 300 dpi line art. The text will print great,and this is the only good answer. Line art multi-page is the subject of most of this magazines have pictures in them, and if youwant to retain those pictures in color, you mustscan the full size page in color mode.

5 That createsa HUGE image. Maybe 6 MB per page even atonly 150 dpi color. Grayscale mode is only one-third the size of Color mode, but multiply thatsize by the number of pages you have, and you stillhave a big files can greatly compress those huge images,but even at only 150 dpi, JPG is probably at least450 KB per full size page (assuming 8% size inches color, which is small enough to hurtthe text quality). Don t ruin your work with a too-low JPG Quality setting (page 134). Experiment alot before starting a large project, to know theeffects of the choices before committing to a the scanner s Descreen filter (Chapter 12) toscan magazine pages with pictures.

6 Better scannerscan show their stuff here about 30 seconds for aMicrotek 8700, 8x10 inches of 300 dpi color WITH descreen (15 without). Lowering the White Point(Chapter 20) makes the paperwhite. For documents, I set itnear the bottom of the largepeak of the white the Black Point makesthe text darker, but don toverdo it, remember the pic-tures in the same image. Extrasharpening afterward helps the text in this mode,and you can exclude a picture by selecting the rec-tangular picture, invert the selection, and is not a multi-page format, so file name organi-zation will be awkward.

7 But you could import thoseJPG images into say Word or Acrobat, so the resultis one multi-page file in page MS Word, use menu Insert Picture From File toinsert each JPG image at the cursor (you can scanimages directly into Word there, but it won t be aJPG file). Then menu Format Picture to size it (andproperties Float Over Text and Wrapping if you need tomove it around on the page). Set Word s page mar-gins small to hold the large images, and scan slightlyinside the original page margins (to be smaller). Yourprinter can not print to the edge of its paper.

8 Don tsize the image larger than the printed page. See page76 about scaling images in 10110 Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the freereader) creates the familiar multi-page PDF files,seen often as manuals on CD. PDF is a proprietaryfile format, but popular, and everyone has the freereader to view them. You need to know that thosePDF manuals we see are NOT scanned normal and optimum PDF situation uses theoriginal page layout program to format and outputthe original text source document as PDF. Thesetext characters are vastly smaller than scanned fullpage images.

9 File sizes like that are NOT possibleif scanning. For example, the site hasthe 1040 tax form online. Two pages are in a 34KB PDF file. Scanning only the first page in Ac-robat at 300 dpi line art creates a 114 KB PDF page of line art image is 3 times larger thantwo pages as text. Scanning that same one pagein 150 dpi color mode creates a 4 MB PDF can directly scan pages into PDF files atmenu File Import - Scan, but scanning pages ingrayscale or color can be huge files (line art can bemanageable).

10 The Acrobat Capture OCR optioncan reduce the size. OCR is time consuming, buttext is always smaller than images, and text issearchable. Acrobat requires at least 200 dpi forOCR, and 300 dpi results are much better. So muchso, the resulting file size can be much smaller,which is counter-intuitive. Scanning the same onepage of Newsweek magazine ( inches) to aPDF file saw these numbers:Color 100 dpi 2 MB OCR not applicableColor 200 dpi MB after OCR 4 MBColor 300 dpi 17 MB after OCR MBLine art 300 dpi 190 KB after OCR 92 KB100 dpi text may be slightly small on a larger moni-tor.