IMSLP Forums

I'm running a Mac (10.11 at work, 10.12 at home, 2.8 GHz Intel Core i5 in both cases) with various all-in-one printer scanners. My best scans have been made by scanning color jp2 @ 600 dpi, then converting to pdf with a black and white filter. Lately, though I've been scanning at normal size, my pages have been coming out 8-10x larger (50"x80" for a 7 x 11 page). The computers are new, and I believe I have used them successfully in the past. I've tried updates of Apple software and scanner drivers. It seems to be an issue in Image Capture. does anyone have any advice?

Does this prevent you from printing a page on an A4 or letter paper with page scaling="fit to printable area" in Acrobat Reader? Many pdf made by libraries are also too large.

Maybe try updating or reinstalling the software for the scanner your using?

How do you convert to pdf? If you use the last version of Imagemagick I just learnt this trick: magick yourimage -density %[fx:w/8.26] yourimage.pdf

8.26 is for A4 format. Change it to 8.5 for letter. (desired width in inches)

You can do the monochrome conversion at the same time appending -threshold 50% (or another threshold) to this command.

This is clearly an older thread, but why aren't you scanning natively in 1-bit mode (monochrome)? That's going to give you by far the lowest file size from the get-go.

In this context "size" means "paper dimensions". Not file size in kilo or megabytes.

I found out what this issue was. For some reason Preview defaults to 72 dpi. If I change the resolution to whatever my original scanning dpi was (generally 400), the pages size returns to the original scanned page size.