[Coco] reducing size of scanned magazines

J.P. Samson coco+list at jeanpaulsamson.com
Wed Aug 12 01:14:13 EDT 2009


On Aug-11-09, at 10:08 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 11:42 PM, J.P. Samson
>> On Aug-11-09, at 9:38 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>> I've been experimenting with the magazine scans on maltedmedia.   
>>> Playing
>>> around with settings in Acrobat, I've managed to get the file  
>>> sizes down
>>> drastically without losing readability.
>>>
>
> I've been using two different options in Acrobat.  First the "Optimize
> Scanned PDF" tool which has several settings and a general slider for
> quality vs size, this will get you down a factor of 8-15 and can  
> take out
> the yellowed paper effect, and then the "Reduce file size" option to
> compatibility with version 9, which takes about 10-20% more off.    
> I've
> played around a bit with the settings on the first tool,  but I'm sure
> further tweaking could yield even better results.  It seems a 10x  
> reduction
> is size without compromising readability of any text is quite  
> realistic.

Assuming you have Acrobat Professional 9, I'd be interested in seeing  
how the ClearScan OCR does for further compressing things.  It seems  
to work surprisingly well for reducing the size of documents, with the  
added bonus of making the text searchable.  For those not in the know,  
ClearScan tries to retain the original look of the text by  
synthesizing new fonts to replace the source image text.  Actual  
graphics and background are extracted and compressed to your requested  
resolution (e.g. 150 dpi), probably using JPEG.

-- JP




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