IMSLP Forums

The person doing the scanning of my mother's music has never heard of CCITT level 4 file compression, nor is she familiar with the term fax level scanning. She is very experienced with scanning and using Adobe Acrobat Professional (she's a Kinkos store manager) and produced an excellent quality 600 dpi scan of a few test pages for me. But they were huge files--3 pages were 5 MB.

What instructions can I give her for compressing the files as required? TIV for any help here.

(Moved to Scanning and PDF Creation forum)

It depends what hardware/software this person is using for scanning. If she is a Kinkos store manager, I would assume it is some sort of industrial multi-function copier. The most important thing is to set the color space to black-and-white (also called 1-bit, line art, or monochrome).

thanks for moving this to the proper forum. Yes, they use a multi-purpose machine as you said. The softward is Adobe Acrobat Professional. Just spoke with another person there who may understand better how to compress files. He's going to work on it and get back to me.

Acrobat Professional will look at the incoming file colorspace and automatically apply an appropriate compression based on default settings. The defaults are pretty good and don't require any tweaking. Normally, at least I think in Acrobat 8, the compression applied to 1-bit images is JBIG2 lossless. This only works if it is fed a 1-bit image, which is why I said to make sure they are being scanned in 1-bit and not 8-bit grayscale.