[Coco] scan documents and turn into pdf

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Mike Pepe may have mentioned these words:
>Hi guys,
>
>I scanned a couple of things that might be of interest.... [snip]
>
>I will turn these into PDFs. Currently they're a bunch of 600 dpi b&w tiffs.
>
>For those of  you who have done this before, any comments? should I 
>resample them down to 300dpi, for example?

[[ The following assumes 300dpi is still very readable ]]

Depends - do you plan on keeping the original scans (and possibly emailing 
the originals to a few people willing to archive them) - or once the PDFs 
are created, delete the originals?

If the former, then I'd say it shouldn't be a problem to downsample - but - 
if the latter, then don't! Information thrown away is never retrieved...

Let's say 5 years down the road, OCR finally becomes useful enough to take 
the TIFF scans at (required) 600dpi and make a workable searchable (and 
much smaller) PDF from them... but you now only have 300dpi info. There's a 
lost opportunity for improving the document.

Always archive at the highest resolution/color depth/etc. as possible. 
Downsampling for distribution is fine, but make sure the originals are 
fairly easily accessible.

That's my take, anyway... ;-)

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |