I assume many of you host a DMS such as Paperless and use it to organise the dead trees you still receive in the snail mail for some reason in the year of the lord 2023.
How do you encode your scans? JPEG is pretty meh for text even at better quantisation levels (“dirty” artefacts everywhere) and PNGs are quite large. More modern formats don’t go into a PDF, which means multiple pages aren’t possible (at least not in Paperless).
Discussion on GH: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/3756
Oh, it’s common in my country to use a smartphone to ‘scan’ documents by actually just taking a lousy photo of them. It’s so prevalent that when you tell someone to do a scan they usually do this instead.
I bought a cheap canon scanner for 50$ and it’s pretty perfect for legal documents. A little slow maybe. I use SANE, then do lossy compression too.
In rare situations I’d then post process the PDF to even worse quality using ghostscript, for example when a foreign visa application form requires a scan of a really long document, but doesn’t accept sizes over 2MB.
@Saigonauticon @Atemu A scanner is a camera. Why complicate things?
I use SANE, then do lossy compression too.
Well, what kind of lossy compression? JPEG?
IME, JPEG looks quite terrible for text documents -even at q=95.
@Atemu
I just use grayscale PNGs, myself. optipng usually takes them down to a decent size.
@Saigonauticon
Hmm, I’m using grayscale PNGs as my baseline here. A 150dpi scan is about 1.3MiB.
A (for the purpose of text documents) similar quality WEBP is about 1/4 of that.
