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Help: Scanning a document

Note Scanning in PDFpen requires OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and a scanner supported by the Image Capture application, or with a TWAIN driver.

The usefulness and ease of working with scanned content depends a lot on the quality of the scan, and also on the bulk of the scanned material in terms of document size. The larger documents are, the more unwieldy and the longer they take to process. Keeping scans small enough to meet all your needs is key to document performance. Some setting recommendations are highlighted below.

Scanning from PDFpen

Choose File > Import from Scanner. You'll see the following Scan window interface:

Kinds of Scan

The kind of scan chosen has the biggest impact on file size and what is stored:

Text: black and white, 1-bit, smallest file size, good for text documents. A single letter-size page at a resolution of 300dpi (dots per inch) will be anything from 75k to 200k in size.

Grayscale: choose 256 gray levels or thousands. 256 gray levels should be more than adequate in most cases. Good for text documents with photos or diagrams that are not color. Generally this scanning mode is either 8 or 16 times larger than Text, so expect a single page at 300dpi to be 1MB-2MB in size.

Color: choose millions or billions of colors. Millions of colors will yield approx 4MB per page at 300dpi, and billions considerably more.

Note that moving from Text to Grayscale, can sometimes allow you to drop the resolution and still yield excellent quality, so something you might scan at 300dpi as Text may come out fine at 200dpi in Grayscale, or in color. Levels of gray or colors often make up for loss in resolution. Experimentation can help to achieve trade-offs of resolution and grayscale or color against file size.

One more general setting that has an effect on the file stored is the Format setting. This lets you set the image encoding stored in your document. Generally TIFF will be the largest and will not compress well for grayscale or color. TIFF is desirable for when Text is the kind chosen. JPEG is the setting you should use for compressing photographs. Otherwise, the general setting for most purposes is PDF.

Settings below Format in the Scan window are scanner-specific.

Overview

An overview of the page in the selected scanner is automatically created when you open the Scan window. PDFpen automatically sets the size and position of the content based on that overview. You may prefer to adjust it to letter or A4 size. Letter is 8.5 x 11 inches, and A4 is 210 × 297mm. If you do adjust the size, you'll also want to drag the outline area to fit the entire page.

Scanning

Once you're done with your settings click "Scan" to scan your document. Once scanned a new document will open containing the scanned material. Change the material in the scanner, and click "Scan" once again to scan again and append a new scanned page to your document. Press Cancel or close the Scan window when you have finished.

The "Detect Separare Items" box can be used to scan each outlined part of the overview page separately. In general use you will leave this box unchecked, but it may occasionally be helpful to separate unrelated content on a page.

 

 
 
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