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
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.
You could also try adjusting the contrast a bit. I use an app called Genius Scan, which increases the contrast of the scanned image to reduce the number of bits needed per pixel. This reduces the size of the file quite a bit, although it obviously isn’t a true representation of the scanned document. The TextCleaner imagemagick plugin looks like it’s doing something similar.
