Scanned book pages to (small) pdf

hi,
these are my thoughts....
1. a lot of time it depends on the quality of the material your scanning what the best settings... ideally the text is nice and sharp with good high contrast.... other wise there always some manipulation to do to improve the quality.... smile...
2. definitely lowering your dpi setting will make smaller file size ! now what the best setting , you may need to experiement I have done very well with using 100-150 dpi in most cases.. going smaller well the text quality a lot of times suffers...
2a. resizing a a graphic scan to something smaller will also give you smaller files size .. that sort of the equilevent of using lower dpi settings...
3. reducing the number of greyscale shades will also reduce the file size...
I have had a few projects where... I reduced the shade number in order to get the file size smaller.... I generally use a different program to do this... sometime just took it down 128 shades or in some cases take it down to 16 shades .. it all depending on the quality of the scan....
now I am a novice with photoshop but it seems it very limited on reducing greyscal shades... programs like gwsrpo or rifanview.com or xnview.com I believe they can give you a lot flexibilty on number greyscales...

note: one can go to just 2 color ie: black and white or called line art, but I get poor quality... and generaly end up doing a lot of editing to improve the sharpness and readibility of scan text....

Lorenz Haas wrote:

Hello, I have scanned a book (pure text) in grayscale and 300dpi. Now I whant to convert the images to a pdf file. To recive a small size I tryed to convert the images to a pixmap (with different filters and optimations). But I don't have found the best options to do so. My file size is still about 200K (in pdf) for an A4 paper size. But all the e-books which also uses scanned images get a result about 80K for one page whith a better looking. Has any of you get these compression with a good readable text. Which filters and conversions do you have used. And of course to which dpi rate and paper size do you have scaled your input image. Thanks for helping, Lorenz P.s.: I have searched the web for that, because I thought there must be somthing like an tutorial for that, but found nothing. So I you know such a side please tell me.

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tacit wrote:
> Are you sure that the ebooks you see are using scanned pages?

Well ebooks is not the right term. For example when old journals converted
in a digital format, one simply scans the pages and transform the images
into a PDF. These things I ment.

> A PDF which contains scans of a page is always going to be larger than a
> PDF created from text, not scans.

Of course.

Lorenz
 >> Stay informed about: Scanned book pages to (small) pdf 

Lorenz Haas wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have scanned a book (pure text) in grayscale and 300dpi. Now I
> whant to convert the images to a pdf file. To recive a small size I
> tryed to convert the images to a pixmap (with different filters and
> optimations). But I don't have found the best options to do so. My
> file size is still about 200K (in pdf) for an A4 paper size.
>
> But all the e-books which also uses scanned images get a result about
> 80K for one page whith a better looking.
>
> Has any of you get these compression with a good readable text. Which
> filters and conversions do you have used. And of course to which dpi
> rate and paper size do you have scaled your input image.
>
>
> Thanks for helping,
>
> Lorenz
>
>
> P.s.: I have searched the web for that, because I thought there must
> be somthing like an tutorial for that, but found nothing. So I you
> know such a side please tell me.

Have you tried CutePDF?
It works as a printer driver, so you can access it from just about any
application that supports printing.
Just print as normal and when you get the dialogue to select printers,
choose CutePDF instead of your normal printer and it will save everything
down as a PDF document.
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