Scanning articles

not really. I don't bother to OCR the text. Just leave it as a bit map. disks are cheaper than my time.

When I scan I don't bother to use the OCR. Once the scan is complete, I accept the entire page and then save it in the highest resolution possible. See if that helps.

Yep - I have a scanner, but have found using my digital camera is much easier - just snap the page and download to the comp via USB

David

Morris Lee wrote:

Some software makes storage and orginization much easier. Check out the PaperPort software.

PCPhill

If you really want to do this, get Acrobat. It is great. Saves files in PDF format. You need the complete program though, not the free reader.

I have been saving my favorite magazine plans and articles like this for some time. Here are some procedures that have worked well for me on an old UMAX Astra 1220P scanner.

1. Scan plans as B+W documents at at least 1000 DPI for a full page plan. Partial page plans need higher resolution, but you really don't need to go above 1800 DPI ( this is better than the quality of the magazine printing itself.) Scans of this resolution work well for vectorizing into CAD programs as well as printing out.

1. Scan a plain text article page as a B+W document at about 150-200 DPI. This is more than enough to read on a screen or to print a hard copy.

2. Scan an article page with construction photos as a B+W PHOTO at 150-250 DPI and the "Descreen" option turned on. The descreen helps to reduce the annoying interference pattern that can occur in a constriction photo when scanning it. Just why this occurs is complicated - try a scan without descreen invoked and one with. You'll see a big difference.

If you are going to do a lot of scanning, be ready to spend a LOT of time doing it unless you have access to extremely expensive first line, commercial grade equipment. Consumer grade scanners are just plain slow, especially when used at high resolutions. Even a consumer grade USB 2.0 scanner will take at 2-3 minutes for an 8.5x11 B+W document scan @ 1000 DPI.

If you have an older computer ( less than 1 gHz ) you'll be better off using the lowest acceptable resolution. As the file size gets bigger, the more computing horsepower you will need. My old 233 mHz Cyrix was barely useable with 1000 DPI scans. It would work, but it seemed to take an hour to modify a drawing in any fashion. My current 1.2 gHz Athlon is far better, but faster would be better still.

When dealing with file sizes, remember that all versions of Windows 95,

98 and ME are limited to file sizes of less than 32 mB- this is a limitation due to how the operating systems were written. I think latter versions of Windows are free from this problem as are the Linnux and MacIntosh OS's.

Here are some typical numbers for various scans:

Full page plan ( 1 sheet 8.5x11 @ 1000 DPI B+W document) - aprox. 14.5 mB plain test article ( 1 sheet 8.5x11 @ 150 DPI B+W document) - aprox. 250 kB page with photos ( 1 sheet 8.5x11 @ 150 DPI PHOTO ) - aprox. 2.1 mB

As you can see, saving just one construction article can take a great deal of hard drive space. Using a file compression utility like WINZIP can really help. A 14.5 mB plan scan can be compressed down to about 1.1 mB. A construction article page with photos won't compress as much, but you can still get a 400 - 500 % reduction in file size.

Mark D. Fain

Ahh I must be having a good day - I can spell it - see - organisation - see, no z

David

PCPhill wrote:

Just out of curiosity, why would one use Acrobat for this task? Isn't it easier to just store the scan as an image file?

Close, David. Put the "z" back in. "organization" :) Dr.1 Driver "There's a Hun in the sun!"

Paperport is OUTSTANDING! I use it exclusively. VERY fast and accurate scanning and lots of options! It rocks!

Depends on how you process it.

Ultimately PDF is no better at compressing bitmaps than anything else.

The trick is to turn it all into black and white lines, then compress it. Goes well.

Get some real software such as Adobe Acrobat to do the OCR work and scanning. MS Works is just a piece of crap they send out with OEM computers so that they can advertize all the software installed.

The cheap and free programs are mere shadows of what Acrobat does to scanned images. Sure, they will give you a .PDF file but that's all they do.

Acrobat files can be made much smaller and cleaner.

Why bother with Adobe?? I just scan my pages as a jpg and call it a day. With jpg, the compression is built in and unless I'm going to reprint plans, it is good enough for reading on the screen or a reprint on the printer. If you want to have specialized software, I would go with the PaperPort option but scan it all as a graphic image. That way you don't have to mess with the OCR unless you want to edit the document. I have never had a problem opening large images in any of the Windows 9x OS's. I use PaintShop Pro for my imaging display and editing so that may be a factor. This includes large .tif files (116meg) as well.

I agree that MS Works is mostly junk except at least the more recent versions have Word rather than the lame excuse they put in before which was really nothing more than WordPad with a few more bells and whistles.

Have fun with all the scanning!!!

Jim W