PDF Reading

[umeshg]

I have scanned some notes from a book . I have a good scanner

I am not enjoying the reading experience with the scanned files. If I download any document such as a manual the quality of the PDF file is very good

How can I get the same quality when I scan my documents

I currently have a Sony-DPT RP1 reader

Thank you

[Dr. Drib]

The General Discussion Forum is for "General discussions about e-book reading not specific to a device, software or format."

Now moved to the PDF Forum.


Don
(Moderator)

[umeshg]

Sorry thank you

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by umeshg

Sorry thank you

No problem.

Hopefully, you'll get some responses that will be helpful.

[rkomar]

It would probably help if you gave more information. What is the problem with the quality? There are many things that can be poor quality.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by umeshg

I have scanned some notes from a book . I have a good scanner

I am not enjoying the reading experience with the scanned files. If I download any document such as a manual the quality of the PDF file is very good

How can I get the same quality when I scan my documents
...

Thank you

Short Answer: you can't, period.

Long Answer: The PDFs of the manuals and other documents you download are almost always created from a word processor or, even more likely, a page layout program (e.g. Adobe InDesign, ...) file. These contain actual text and/or vector outlines of text. These are infinitely sharp and will scale to any size without degradation if the PDF is correctly created. Also, the white "paper" background is 100% white. Scanned pages, on the other hand, are merely pictures of a printed page and image any and all flaws in the paper and the printing. When enlarged, they blur and/or pixelate.

Careful use of the scanner settings (levels adjustment for clean whites and blacks, adequately high resolution, ...) may improve your results. You may also find that you need to save each page as a separate TIFF ( DO NOT USE JPEG for this) file and then reprocess each file in a good bitmap editor (e.g. Photoshop, ...) to get the cleanest white page and solid black text, and then reassemble the TIFFs into a PDF with carefully chosen options using an appropriate tool (e.g. Adobe Acrobat, ...). It can be a challenge to get good looking PDFs from scanned pages without ending up with a MASSIVE file.

[drjenkins]

You can sometimes OCR your scans and get relatively clean text after a bit of proofing. If your notes are handwritten this will not likely work.

[willus]

You might try running your scans through ScanTailor, but it's important that you start with decent scanner settings and resolution, like dwig pointed out.