Date   : Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:52:39 +0200
From   : anders.carlsson@... (Anders Carlsson)
Subject: The Micro User

Darren Grant wrote:

> I'd rather have searchable readable text.

Me too. Most documents I've scanned I have saved as text files (!) 
recreating any graphic content there was as ASCII graphics (!!) whenever 
possible. However that was almost 10 years ago I was active doing that. 
Today I would probably opt for a semi-graphical PDF trying to at least 
recreate the font and formatting, even if not the full graphic layout.

A friend of mine is scanning a lot of magazines and some books, publishing 
them as graphic, non-searchable PDFs. He works really fast and the documents 
are remarkably small in file size given the content. Probably he uses a very 
good PDF generator that knows the exact right trade-off between image 
quality and file size.

Depending on the type of document, I can see the benefit to preserve the 
scans as they are. An instruction manual often is more desireable to have as 
a searchable text document than a magazine with game reviews and 
advertisments, which are close to impossible to OCR without losing half the 
fun. Basic listings within the magazine would be nice to have as text, but 
even better to submit them on a supplementary SSD image or such.

Best regards

-- 
Anders Carlsson