Brian, thanks for your very detailed and informative message. Yes, my Neat scanner has the 2 buttons “PDF” and “Scan” on the front. I had forgotten this, and seem to recall from a prior conversation with Neat that I am somehow able to scan jpegs using them. However, I’m not having luck doing that now. I’ll call them tomorrow. I don’t like this design feature – every other action is performed from an on-screen menu, and I can’t find these equivalents in a menu.
Thanks again, Barton From: Brian L. Lightfoot [mailto:br...@the-lightfoots.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 1, 2015 7:05 PM To: legacyusergroup@LegacyUsers.com Subject: RE: [LegacyUG] unsupported file format I’m assuming that you’ve read the other replies about the use of JPEGS vs. PDFs. A “real image” is loosely described as a photographic image or a digital representation of the image. Your PDF document (notice the keyword “document”) may contain text, images, or other digital objects. A PDF cannot be viewed except via the use of a PDF viewer, free from Adobe or other 3rd party choices. They are two completely different file formats. You CAN NOT simply rename your PDF file as a JPG. You would need to use a PDF utility program which can extract the internal images and save them in JPG format. Adobe’s full-fledged Acrobat program can do that easily but of course is a somewhat expensive program. I’m not sure if any 3rd party program for PDFs can extract images. If your scanner is like many flatbed scanners, it probably has 2 or 3 buttons on the front of it labeled “email, PDF, and maybe one named image”. You may wish to consider not using these buttons because they are designed to be extremely simplified and leave nothing up to the choice of the user. If you are sticking a document (such as a death certificate) in your scanner and just pressing the button labeled PDF, then it will work seemingly just fine but leaving you little to no choice about resolution, color or greyscale, cropping, etc. The PDF produced by your scanner will have problems when you try to integrate the PDF file with other software such a Word, Legacy, and many other programs which are designed to show a great deal of text that can be sprinkled with images and photos. Instead, try to use any stand-alone software that may have come with the scanner or any of the free 3rd party imaging software which support the WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) interface (almost all do). In other words, if your scanner is relatively new, it will be recognized by any of these imaging programs via Window’s WIA interface. From there you’ll be able to scan the death certificate at a choice of resolutions, greyscale option if you want it, and the resulting JPEG (or TIFF) image can be further edited to suit your fancy. Such a digital image can be easily dropped right into Legacy, or added to any word processing document or web page without the need for any special viewer. So the bottom line is this: your choice of using PDFs for images in not wrong. It’s just that it limits your abilities to use the PDF and possible future editing of the image itself. That’s where the “real image” makes life easier. Brian in CA After writing all that above, I noticed you mentioned “Neat Scanner”. I google it and then looked at the various models of Neat Scanners ranging from a sheet-fed desktop model to those rod-like mobile scanners. The sheet-fed desktop models do indeed have two buttons on them, labeled “Scan” and “PDF”. However, the specs for them indicate that they are TWAIN compliant which is the old Win98-Win2000 standard which was effectively replaced by the new API called WIA. The good news is that WIA did not abandon TWAIN so they should continue to work on at least Win7 systems. Drivers for Win8 or Win10 might be a crapshoot. The rod shaped mobile Neat scanner however does not list WIA or TWAIN in its specs but apparently uses their proprietary software called Neatworks. That alone does not leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling but perhaps yours is something different. And it looks like Neatworks scans everything as a PDF. From: BARTON LEWIS [mailto:bartonle...@optonline.net] Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 10:28 AM To: legacyusergroup@LegacyUsers.com <mailto:legacyusergroup@LegacyUsers.com> Cc: Legacy Subject: RE: [LegacyUG] unsupported file format I am not sure what is meant by "real image." This is a death certificate that I scanned using my Neat scanner. I have previously attached PDFs as Media files without a problem. I will rescan or simply try to rename the file as a jpg -- I assume I can do this easily (not at my home computer now). For my edification, can someone explain why one should use a jpg as opposed to pdf if (as here) one would not want to edit or manipulate the image? Thank you. Barton On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 12:42 PM, Brian L. Lightfoot wrote: I somewhat support this question about using PDFs when the real image might be better/easier especially in this instance when I’m assuming that the PDF is nothing other than a JPEG image or two. Yes, it is entirely possible for PDFs to be added to Legacy but are they supported in all reports and web page creations? Wouldn’t it be better to extract the JPEG image from the PDF and then attach the JPEG as a picture? Brian in CA From: David Abernathy [mailto:da...@schmeckabernathy.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 7:30 AM To: legacyusergroup@LegacyUsers.com <mailto:legacyusergroup@LegacyUsers.com> Subject: RE: [LegacyUG] unsupported file format Why are you using PDF type of files, when they need to be of a real image type? Thanks, David C Abernathy Email disclaimers ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This message represents the official view of the voices in my head. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.SchmeckAbernathy.com == All outgoing and incoming mail is scanned by F-Prot Antivirus == From: Barton Lewis [mailto:bartonle...@optonline.net] Sent: Monday, August 31, 2015 8:17 PM To: legacyusergroup@LegacyUsers.com <mailto:legacyusergroup@LegacyUsers.com> Subject: [LegacyUG] unsupported file format I am trying to attach a pdf of a death certificate as Media to a Source, and I am getting the message “unsupported file format.” Does Legacy not permit pdf’s to be attached as media? Barton Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages after Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyusers.com/ Archived messages from old mail server - before Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyfamilytree.com/ Online technical support: http://support.legacyfamilytree.com Follow Legacy on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LegacyFamilyTree) and on our blog (http://news.LegacyFamilyTree.com). 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