PDF's

[Detroit47]

What program do you guys use to make PDF's? Is there one out there for free? I have a mountain of old books and literature that I would like to share.

73 John N8QPC

[KA8WTK]

I beleive Open Office will do that, and it is free. Type "Open Office" into google and take a look.

Bill

[WQ9E]

Both Foxit and Primo provide free PDF writers.  They install as a printer and either works fine, I have used both.

Proper choice of color and resolution are important in avoiding excessively large output files, you can choose these in print settings when you are creating the PDF.

[Tom WA3KLR]

My new Canon LIDE200 flatbed scanner software offers .pdf as a standard output selection when saving a scan.

[Opcom]

A couple comments on the free stuff based on lots of frustration and experience with this:

Beware the highly compressed low quality images in some of the free pdf writers. Cutepdf and Pdfwiter are known for this.

300dpi is the minimum for good scanning quality, got to start with a quality input. So that's about 2800 pixels wide, and I resample to 1500 wide in a graphics program, sharpen sometinmes, and save at 93%. Then off to the PDF writer with least compression, or the high quality JPG output setting.

PDF uses a compression like a JPG file, so the setting should allow a high quality option (85% or better), or the higher DPI scan will just get dumbed down in the PDF and look poor like a 150dpi job.

I have good success scanning in 64 or 256 shades of gray scale.

The good quality files will be somewhat large but the users of the information will like the quality and won't get eye strain when reading fine print or blowing up schematics only to find that C1's value is just a blur a few pixels wide and they can't tell if that a 9 or a 4, and then your scanning time is wasted.

Good quality 8.5x11 pages are generally 750K-1.5M in size depending on graphics content and this holds fairly true for really good PDF files. I am sure some people will argue that, so all I can say is it is from my experience and my opinion scanning stuff for my own website's use, and that I will not publish bad-looking low-res images. If size matters, sometimes the few pages that -must- have better treatment get it, and the rest are downsampled a bit.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

If the document is old and/or the pages are not white (or close to white) if you scan the sheet at to a high resolution, you wind up also scanning the background, which normally you don't want to do. The net result is a page scan that has all the important stuff but the entire page has a light gray shade (or darker) background. All that stuff adds to the total file size bytes and doesn't add to the quality of the scan.

[KF1Z]

Open Office PDF output is tricky too....

Pictures do have to be VERY good, and high res,,,,

Or they come out crappy in the PDF...

[Opcom]

Pete you have a very good point. I always have to post-process when scanning yellowed or faded old stuff and it does not always come out perfect. I've tried with lower resolutiuons and it did not seem to help.

But what else to do if the page has small print or otherwise detailed images? I'm certainly interested in the steps to make that better.

I have been using the old 'adobe acrobat 5' program I bought used when a friend bought a full newer version.