Scanning PDF Documents

The below scanner settings and process will yield the best results when scanning PDF documents for the web. The goal is to obtain the best quality images, the smallest size files, and files that are searchable with Adobe Reader. Most scanners are sold with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software which enables Adobe Reader to search the document.

When scanning documents that require color representation to understand the document by all means use color.

1. Turn OCR on if it is not on by default.
2. Catalog front cover settings:
   Exposure type: Document
        Image type: 24-bit Color -
         Resolution: 300dpi
3. Catalog page settings:
   Exposure type: Document
        Image type: Black & White - 32 kb file size
         Resolution: 300dpi
4. As you can see by the above file sizes the 24-bit color image is 13 times larger than the Black & White image.
5. Before scanning the entire catalog test and make sure that the OCR has been embedded by opening the file with Adobe Reader and search for some text on the page.
6. I highly recommend scanning each page of the catalog as one document file. By doing this you will end up with one file for each page scanned, and you can stop and restart scanning as you please. When you are finished scanning all of the pages you can use Basic PDFsam (Free) to combine the individual page files into 1 PDF file.