> The filesize of as pdf saved scans is enourmous: one page scans often > take more than 14 Mb of filespace.
I routinely routinely use Xsane to scan documents directly to pnm (Portable aNy Map) format, which I then convert to muli-page pdf files using netpbm tools. If the ink on a document is faded or non-uniform, I ususally will scan @256 shades [1byte/pixel] of gray and then convert to black & white [2bits/pixel]. A typical scan would be ~40-60K/page. I wrote a shell script "scans2pdf" to filter the pnm to pdf. http://www.acjlaw.net:8080/~jeremy/Ricoh/scripts/scans2pdf If I have a series of grayscale scans in pnm format named out.%04d.pnm I would convert the pnm images to a single multi-page pdf thus: #scans2pdf -bw 0.6 out which would create out.pdf and then remove the out.*.pnm files There is also a program "tic98" which will compress pnm text documents using a dictionary of the scanned characters. It reportedly offers the best compression for text-based images. The compressed pnm can then be uncompressed (using the same settings used for compression) and then converted to pdf. Unfortunately, if you are emailing the pnm.tic98 file to someone, they must install untic98 to decompress the file and pip to read/write file descriptors -- so it's not as easy as sharing a pdf.
