Now that I have my Canon PIXMA MG2120 working as a scanner I was looking at the possibility of using it to scan some documents for archival purposes. My intent is to scan some old bills and other documents and database them in some manner before disposing of the originals. As these are mostly bills and other documents they tend to be B&W with the possible exception of some logos or letter head/foot in color.
I am trying to determine how best to scan and save these documents. I would like to be able to reprint them in the future if that becomes necessary, implying a high quality scan. But I am also concerned with the size of the saved documents on my system. What is the best file format for saving such documents? I would imagine that 16 or possibly even 8 colors would suffice to represent the documents, assuming the palette can be specified. The documents are likely to be mostly white-space, so I would expect them to be highly compressible. Given I am interested in databasing them I would also think that using an OCR program to extract the content would be useful. I tried a few things with that on a small document and encountered problems, given the mixed content of the particular document. Are there any specific recommendations for scanning a document with OCR in mind? As I am running linux I am looking at tesseract and cuneiform at this point, at least one of which wants a B&W document for input and whose results appear to vary quite a bit with the scan resolution. Am I dealing with conflicting goals? Will I need to scan each document twice or more to accomplish what I want here? Dave
