[Coco] Re: scan documents and turn into pdf

[Mike Pepe]

farna at att.net wrote:
> JPG is great for photos, and as mentioned, horrible for text! PDF is basically a form of PostScript -- it uses the same technology. That's over simplification I know, but will suffice for now. A PDF file is very much like an encapsulated PostScript file -- it has all the information needed to reproduce the document in the file, including font definitions, and does justice to graphics as well. There's not much better for both graphics and text, and it's widely used now that the patents have run out! 
> 
> There is no need to rescan the documents assuming you're running on a PC or Linux machine. There are utilities that install as a printer and will generate PDF output. The one I use most is "PDF995" (www.pdf995.com). There is a $9.95 registartion fee or the program will display an ad banner while it's processing the file or for 30 seconds or so, whichever comes first. It's not intrusive at all. I don't know the name of such utilities for a Linux box, but I'm sure they are out there. Just load your files into whatever program you use to edit them then "print" using the driver. It creates a PDF file. At the PDF995 site there are also free (with the reasonable ad, or, you guessed it, a $9.95 registration fee) utilities to merge multiple PDFs into a single file and to edit PDF files. I use PDF995 extensively in my little magazine publishing ventures, and to create the latest revision of "Tandy's Little Wonder". 
> 
> --
> Frank Swygert
> Publisher, "American Motors Cars" 
> Magazine (AMC)
> For all AMC enthusiasts
> http://farna.home.att.net/AIM.html
> (free download available!)
> 

Well, I have about 3 programs that can export the pile of TIFFs into a 
PDF. I'm still playing with the various settings. My latest attempt 
resulted in a nice looking but 60M PDF which I think is a bit too big.

I was really trying to OCR the thing, but even the latest and greatest 
OCR package can't seem to make sense out of all of it, and cleaning up 
the resulting mess isn't worth my time, unfortunately.

-Mike