Scanning to B & W vs. Gray Scale?

what's a pencil?

try both.

I have.

...tool that gets shorter with use.

seen any bears lately?

Just Psychedelic Furs...Pretty in Gray Scale.

Yep, scanning low contrast text can be a lot clear in B&W, but light blemishes in the paper can suddenly become prominent depending on thresholds.

Ah I see...Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 has a despeckler which seems to help, have you tried it?

Acrobat pro drives me insane - I use it professionally and I'm at a loss why an OCR'd file gets so big - why can't it just store the UTF-8 code and call an external font? But no, it wants to store the original scanned bitmap of the letter. File size matters in the context we use it. Read Out Loud is kind of fun though.

I am talking CS 3 though, haven't had a play in CS5.

We use paperport for despeckling.

Ah then you’re just the guy I need to talk to please kind sir!

When scanning at home, I go from my Canon MF4150 to Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 and it despeckles and deskews. However Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 cannot deskew at more the 17 degrees (I think it is) so I've read you need Photoshop (or equivalent) and have to adjust each page manually (what a pain in the butt if true).

What I would much prefer is a despeckling and deskewing all-in-one application that can handle larger angles than 17 degrees.

As far as OCR I am open to suggestions as to which you think is best.

In fact I am open to any suggestions you have to get the best possible scans from text that is faded, and/or old, and/or photocopied too many times, and/or speckled, etc.

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Here is another question I hope you can help with. When scanning at work I've been trying to find a simple easy method to handle larger scanned pdf files, but I have not been able to.

When using the Canon ImageRUNNER 7086 to scan documents to pdf, they get forwarded as attachments via email. The problem is the pdf file gets chopped into small scraps of about 800 KB to 2 MB each. That translates to only about six double-sided pages at 600 DPI per attachment. This means larger pdf scans use many separate emails. This turns out to be very impractical and time consuming because I have so many divided files to deal with.

Is there some way to stop the Canon ImageRUNNER 7086 from dividing a scanned pdf into many separate emails? Or is there some way I can scan to pdf and then access the file via FTP? Or is there some way I can scan to pdf and have the file available on the network Shared Drive? Or is there some way to access the file via USB or Ethernet directly from the Canon ImageRUNNER 7086 to my laptop?

The bottom line is, I wish to simply and easily and quickly scan lager documents @ 600 DPI to pdf as a single file, and then offload the file to my laptop.

Also the Canon ImageRUNNER 7086 seems to only scan to pdf in Black and White and not Gray Scale, but why might that be? It will scan to tiff @ 600 DPI, but I do not if that would be a good thing or not. What say you?

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Also as a general question for both home and work, if I have a document scanned in as a pdf @ 600 DPI can I despeckle and deskew later or does that process have to be done while the data is actually being transmitted by the scanner in real time?

are you studying to be a spy?

I used to have one of those little pen cameras. worthless crap...

but your equipment sounds groovy.

No such luck!

I teach Electrical for a living and there are a number of Instructors at our Technical Institution that have been here for 30 years. Thus they have a large collection of hard-copy material suitable for distribution in my class.

However I need to scan it all in, and categorize it etc, to be of any practical long term use to me.

If I do not scan it all in, and categorize it etc. I'll end up with tons and tons of hard-copy material and I'll have to sort through and copy it each and every time I want to give the students some handouts for homework etc.

So any advice you might have about streamlining and improving efficiency and scan accuracy would be appreciated.

I have been on a technical legal website (I forgot the name) in which people spend great deals of time and energy scanning and categorizing hard-copy to pdf but I cannot recall the name of the forum website, and I did not get any useful information. Not to say that there would be no useful information there if I could remember the forum website's URL.

gotta say, being a spy sounds much more fun and exciting.

but at least you have that large penis working for you...

Everything comes down to size at some point.

Sorry Chumly - you floated off the first page of my posts.

We're stuck with Xerox scanning with Paperport to build docs and acrobat CS4 to OCR publish files. There may be something better out there but we don't have leeway to experiment.

I posted my question about Acrobat's weird PDF OCRing to a listserv but got only commiserations and no answers.

Can't help you with the Canon imagerunner - don't suppose you have an onsite support contract? You might luck out actually contacting Canon, or downloading a manual? This isn't meant to sound like I'm teaching you to suck eggs - you've probably already done this, but I don't know squat outside our tools and that's what I'd do in your situation.

Missed your last question!

You don't have to despeckle in realtime.

Thanks hingehead!