I usually use Xsane for my day-to-day scanning. Today I had to scan a 12 page document, combine it with 4 other pages, and email the result. I selected "To PDF" from the document feeder using color, because there was some blue text, and 300 DPI. The pages were a whopping 5-6 MB each! When added to 4 other pages from another PDF I got a 70MB file that even the Windows version of Acrobat X couldn't reduce. Also note that Xsane scans to individual files thus requiring the use of yet another program (pdf shuffler) to combine them.
I did a few minutes web searching and found comments about Simple Scan. It's a very sparse interface and to change setting you have to change "preferences" before scanning - no on-the-fly changes before a scan.
I set the "text" scanning to 300 DPI - same as I had used with Xsane - and re-scanned all 12 pages, leaving the other settings, Contrast, Brightness, and at the defaults. Simple Scan put all the pages into a single file and it totaled 4MB. Much better! It even scans double sided pages using my duplexer, no problem. The only down-sides were no option to scan "text" in color and leaving page size as "default" resulted in legal size pages even though the paper was letter sized. I set the page size to Letter in preferences and the second run through was better. I also tested at 150 DPI but I considered that to be too blurry for use - still readable but noticeably fuzzy - but the size was better at only 950KB.
One final test was to scan the same set of pages as "photo" (the only other option using this very simple program). This preserved the blue text color, but also resulted in a 17.3 MB file vs. the 4MB using the "text" option - with the same 300 DPI.
Disclaimer: Simple Scan is a GTK program. If you are GTK adverse, don't install it.
ADDITIONAL PDF SHRINKAGE TIP:
The package "ghostscript" (former known as pdftk) contains two programs; pdf2ps and ps2pdf.
It seems if you use the first to convert a PDF to a PS file, then use the second to convert it back to PDF you get a much smaller file in many cases. I attempted this using the 70MB file that Xsane created and the final result was 14.5MB. The only degradation I noticed was the blue text, while still blue, was a less-blue-sort-of-grayish blue. Attempting this same test on the 4MB file from Simple Scan actually resulted in a larger 5.1MB file. Clearly, Simple Scan is more efficient than either Xsane or the ghostscript options.
Happy scanning!
I did a few minutes web searching and found comments about Simple Scan. It's a very sparse interface and to change setting you have to change "preferences" before scanning - no on-the-fly changes before a scan.
I set the "text" scanning to 300 DPI - same as I had used with Xsane - and re-scanned all 12 pages, leaving the other settings, Contrast, Brightness, and at the defaults. Simple Scan put all the pages into a single file and it totaled 4MB. Much better! It even scans double sided pages using my duplexer, no problem. The only down-sides were no option to scan "text" in color and leaving page size as "default" resulted in legal size pages even though the paper was letter sized. I set the page size to Letter in preferences and the second run through was better. I also tested at 150 DPI but I considered that to be too blurry for use - still readable but noticeably fuzzy - but the size was better at only 950KB.
One final test was to scan the same set of pages as "photo" (the only other option using this very simple program). This preserved the blue text color, but also resulted in a 17.3 MB file vs. the 4MB using the "text" option - with the same 300 DPI.
Disclaimer: Simple Scan is a GTK program. If you are GTK adverse, don't install it.
ADDITIONAL PDF SHRINKAGE TIP:
The package "ghostscript" (former known as pdftk) contains two programs; pdf2ps and ps2pdf.
It seems if you use the first to convert a PDF to a PS file, then use the second to convert it back to PDF you get a much smaller file in many cases. I attempted this using the 70MB file that Xsane created and the final result was 14.5MB. The only degradation I noticed was the blue text, while still blue, was a less-blue-sort-of-grayish blue. Attempting this same test on the 4MB file from Simple Scan actually resulted in a larger 5.1MB file. Clearly, Simple Scan is more efficient than either Xsane or the ghostscript options.
Happy scanning!
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