Re: Literature viewing

Posted by BigKev On 2022/2/2 10:50:05

Just some comments from my experience scanning over 20,000 pages of material.

On a brochure, if a page was laid out as a single page spread, meaning you didn't need to look at that page and its neighbor at the same time to read it, then I scanned that as a single page. But if it had content/picture that flowed across two pages (2-page spread), then I scanned both of those pages together for viewing as a single large page.

I even had to scan and piece together brochures with fold-outs that had 4-page spreads.

My point is that it should be scanned in the "view mode" that it was intended to be seen in. PDF readers can view 2 pages at once, but getting that PDF set up right so that it knows which 2 pages are supposed to be seen together is a pain, and that doesn't account for the 3x, 4x spreads.

PDFs are not like the simple images we attach here in the forums. The PDF readers can handle large content more gracefully as they are made to read documents, not just a single picture.

But, with all that being said, I generally had to balance the quality, with the size of the file it produces, and the storage I rented to store that file on the webserver.

10mb for example doesn't sound like much, when when you have 1000s of 10mb files, it adds up.

In the past, it was more critical as a lot of folks were still on dial-up. Now at least, that represents only a slim minority of folks.

And every year I've increased storage space, so space isn't as much of huge concern as it used to be. But we should stay away from scanning 20-50-100mb files. They are generally just too large for most casual readers to get any additional benefit from vs a 5-10-15mb file. After all, we are scanning these for reading, but reproduction.

As far as scanning, I never scan above 300 DPI for color, and never above 150 for B/W or Greyscale items. I usually scan everything at 300 DPI color, and then convert to B/W or Grey as needed and reduce DPI. This tends to pick up more detail in my experience.

The brochures were never true photographic quality. You only ever got that from the photo negatives in the past. So the printing process to print those brochures was usually less than 300 dpi if we are comparing to today's terminology. A magnifying glass should show how that all comes together.

Just my $.02