[TR] 'More BS..." difficulties

[Randall]

> I had it 'digitized' at a local printer's, and they maynot 
> have known what they were doing.  I told them I would 
> 'emailing it',  but they made it 25MB large,  Is this too big 
>  for a .pdf?  (It's only a 30 page booklet.

Certainly too large to email !  

But not unusual at all for a PDF that is a scan (actually pretty good).  The
problem is that each page winds up being a large graphic image, and graphic
images take up a lot of space.  For example, scanning an 8.5 by 11" page at
300 dpi results in over 8 million pixels.  Even if each pixel only takes one
byte (in monochrome), that's over 8 Mb per page !  Of course compression can
knock that down, but 8:1 compression is very good, and that still leaves you
with 1 Mb/page.

The best solution is to run the text through OCR (Optical Character
Resolution) and only keep the images as images.  But, that takes a whole LOT
of work (resulting text has to be proof-read, corrected, formatted, linked
to images, etc.) and is far outside the scope of just scanning a document.

I went through it with the A-type service manual, and managed to turn a 32
page document into a 2.6 Mb PDF.  But I won't be doing it again any time
soon !

Randall