How to make scanned copies for publishing
I hope nobody takes this as negative criticism, but I do (fortunately) get lots of documents from ”you” out there. And that’s great.
However, to make these documents as good as possible, and make them usable for more than ordinary web-publishing, please take these facts into concideration:
1) A scanned document should be AT LEAST 200 dpi. More than 300 dpi is never necessary, but 200 – 300 dpi is the best. (Reasons later)
2) Even if the document is “Black and white”, ALWAYS scan the document as “GRAYSCALE” (reasons later)
3) To send documents to me, JPG format is the best, but other formats can be used. On the Watchtower Observer I use only JPG for technical reasons.
4) Color images should have the same resolution (200 – 300 dpi), and should ALWAYS be RGB images. (CMYK is used only for 4-color printing)
The reasons for using at least 200 dpi and grayscale are these:
Some documents needs to be OCR’ed. This is, get a program to “read” the text, and make this text available as editable text. If the image I get is 72 dpi (standard web resolution) and black/white (bitmap), it may be hard for the OCR software to read the text, and I have to spend a lot of time editing errors. In some cases I need to manually type the text.
Also, to make the image as clear as possible, and as easy to read as possible, I may need to adjust the colors/gray scale to make it look better. Such as removing “gray paper-color”, make the text clearer, etc. On 72 dpi images this is really hard to do, and the results are always less good than with images 200 dpi or higher.
If the image/page shall be used for anything else than web-publishing, even newspapers use 150 dpi. In my magazine I use 300 dpi, since the screens are much higher. But interpolating is possible if the original is at least 200 dpi.
By making the originals sent to me at least 200 dpi I can edit, correct errors, OCR or publish these documents on many platforms – including printing.
I hope nobody took this as sour critic, it wasn’t meant as such. Just as som pointers on how to make scanned material as good as possible.
I’m sure the same goes for Randy, who also do need good images for reproduction in his Free Minds Journal.
Thanks in advance.
BTW. I still haven’t got the latest KM, and hope someone can supply me with scans….
Yakki Da
Kent
I need more BOE letters, KMs and other material. Those who can send it to me - please do! The new section will be interesting!!
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